Leggy and Lovely?

Heather on Blacka in August can be leggy and lovely. Those hoping for a saucy tabloid picture at this point may be disappointed.

Why the flowering heather is so eye catching is that it is badly managed by the standards of 'good moorland management', as it’s promoted by such groups as the Moorland Association or The Heather Trust or any of the large number of the clones set up by the wealthy shooting sector. Those places where heather is kept short give us nothing like the vividness of flowering in August that you see on Blacka. It also improves the visual attraction that the heather is just one of the components. Among the others are bilberry cowberry,bracken, bramble, birch, rowan and oak. A monoculture of continuous heather even when it's less brown and becomes tinged with purple is a pretty poor spectacle in my book. At least you can eat broccoli.

It's the one time when the brownness of the heather gives way to something more pleasant. At last you've stopped boring me, I want to say. Not just the shooters but the conservation people are always filling their publicity material with photos of flowering heather, as if the other 11 months of the year don't exist. But the shooters are always playing up the threat to heather and especially their kind of heather. Among those threats is the heather beetle, now giving these people problems in the Peak District. And this can now be seen on Blacka. So are we now to have pesticides as well as herbicides on a nature reserve?

Well, no, the shooters are not in favour of chemicals for this problem, mainly because there is no effective treatment. I bet they would spray if they thought it might work. Though I do note their recommendation for managing a moor affected by the beetle.

In years when beetle outbreaks occur, the carrying capacity of the moor for grouse, deer and sheep is reduced. Managers should take steps to shoot the game species hard (!)  and reduce the sheep/days per hectare on the hill in winter to reduce the browsing impact on the remaining heather.  

These outbreaks look like the usual problem of monocrops. Nowhere in the world can you devote large areas of land to promoting one species of vegetation without attracting pests and diseases that are specific to the crop and therefore don’t have to work very hard to find their host victim. The heather mob are farming the landscape for the benefit of one bird and for the people who get fun from killing it, cultivating huge parts of the uplands artificially with one plant. This is so unnatural that pest and disease problems are inevitable. The answer could be to plant lots of native trees. Why not? Much more natural than all this heather. Or, alternatively, what about carrots, or broccoli, or cabbage; in rotation of course.