Cuckoo Land ?

In recent weeks parts of Blacka might be called Cuckoo Land, great fun for all those who like to hear and see the bird and the other wildlife that thrives here, where nature has been reclaiming land once over- exploited.  Scrub (horrid word to describe a fascinating habitat) and newer woodland must never be described as unfavourable unless your standard is its fitness for fattening livestock and growing feed crops. They are the perfect neighbours to older and ancient woods.

Some of the self appointed local wildlife 'stakeholders' however seem wilfully blind to the point of inhabiting Cloud Cuckoo Land. I remember the bird expert who was held in awe by the wildlife trust and others, attending consultations and holding forth. He once came to an early RAG meeting, his brief being to present a case for the wildlife trust's conservation grazing, bringing the heathland into favourable status. His argument rested on a bird survey which showed a decline in the number of species on this unmanaged land.  His message was that this was a catastrophe and needed to be rectified by good management. He made a great fuss about the lack of breeding grouse. I asked him if any species were actually doing well or increasing. He made a bit of a face, thought a bit and said "Wrens" but volunteered no other birds. Now this man was not stupid so why did he decline to mention the huge numbers of summer visiting birds that thrive on the least managed parts of Blacka? The answer is that people like him have an agenda which must keep them on-message: "Management is good." They have swallowed the propaganda (or written it themselves) as part of the land-managing, landowning and land-exploiting classes.

The post written about Houndkirk Road and the moors to either side is just as relevant today as it was then. A few weeks ago I did another comparison of this area with what I had seen and heard on Blacka less than an hour before. It was 8 minutes before any bird was seen in the heather - a pipit of which there are many on Blacka (and nothing to do with management). There are people you meet who rave about birds that they never see and who don't see birds that everyone else sees. This is what's meant by being on-message. There's an audience for their propaganda, people who will hear them but who won't go out and check for themselves that they are being told the truth. Some of this audience is to be found in the groups identified by Ian Rotherham and mentioned in this post.

Rotherham in the same article claimed that descriptions of part of the Peak District as an ecological desert, referring to an article by George Monbiot were inaccurate. He retorted that he regularly sees

"skylarks, meadow pipits, stonechats, wheatears, red grouse, curlews, lapwing, snipe, short-eared owls, kestrels, peregrine, merlins, ravens, snow buntings, cuckoos, whinchats and more"

and I see them too but most of them not on the high treeless moorlands to the west of Sheffield where for me and many others, there's very little interest.  Is he being disingenuous here?  He claims to be indignant that it could be described as boring. If we disagree so much about what we see then we all ought to get out more and look with our own eyes and not see what we hope to see but what's actually there.