Let There Be Light!

Lincoln Cathedral could just be identified though rather hazy while we were being drenched by a heavy shower. The lighter sky 40 miles away emphasised the darkness of the sky above.

Then things improved, quite suddenly.

Spelling It Out

So far no sign of extra cattle on Blacka. The six cows remain in the grassy pastures but the word passed round recently that nine more were to come has not been confirmed. That message claimed the fifteen would then be released onto the moor, obviously a daft idea but when has that prevented a decision being made? Local people are almost certainly unaware that there is a strong possibility of more cattle than that in future. Nigel has indicated as much in a recent report to the council. The farmification and consequent compromising the essential atmosphere of the site will not trouble him as he rarely, if ever, visits Blacka. He did not respond to my recent request even though I graciously allowed him to post his comment in reply to my post last week - without editing, tempting though it was.

As I was saying, there is no evidence that SWT as an institution has any reservation at all about farmification. In fact all the signs point the other way. The significance of my pointing out their failures to mention deer in their published guide and various other articles and paperwork relates to the way they see the site. To them it is primarily a managed site. The emphasis is important - not even so much a wildlife site that needs some management, but a site for which management is the essential characteristic. The distinction is vital. Managed sites like this are places, in SWT's view, where the natural features and the wildlife must be controlled and kept in their place. And farming is the industry which does this alongside their only slightly modified conservation aims. Wilding is tantamount to a threat. All of those naturalising tendencies that this blog has tried to celebrate in recent years run counter to SWT's objectives which are not far removed from a kind of gardening in which the forks and spades are replaced by cows and sheep*. Nigel's words claiming the emphasis on cattle are 'only this' or the lack of mention of deer are 'only that' are just not believable. The production of literature that is meant to inspire people about the place, failing to mention even just one word in passing about deer or other mammals and underlining over and again the importance of grazing and farm livestock - well that 's either utterly incompetent or cynically disingenuous. Because what really inspires the locals who visit is wildness in the form of the wild mammals and the unmanaged sections of landscape that they seem most at home in, not the cow-pat factories on legs that need barbed wire and plastic feed and lick buckets and which wreck the paths.

The truth is that there is a vision of the place that they have wished to implant in the minds of the reader which goes like this - that the English countryside is as nothing without management. Always emphasising farming and the uses in the past of woodland for coppicing and various other ways in which parts of the countryside were exploited while never talking about those other places and times when and where such intervention was minimal or absent, has been an underlying theme, and its promotion has been calculated. They almost certainly call it 'education'. Unsurprisingly I call it propaganda.

Some years ago an article in the Sheffield Telegraph drew attention to my personal sadness that this land was to be turned into farmland and my wish for it to be left alone. A letter came in the paper's next edition from an ecologist who supported the wildlife trust pointing out my ignorance and commenting on the inevitability that the land would become dense woodland if I had my way. Did I not realise that in the distant past the land was 'managed' by deer who maintained a balance between trees and open areas? He had not even bothered to find out that deer were an important factor on Blacka having returned some years before! A Natural England officer commented that Blacka is nothing without conservation - presumably meaning farm management. Our minds tried to grasp the vision of a kind of vacuum, or the universe before the Big Bang - nothing!?

Nigel's missive bewails my failure to 'recognise the common ground between us'. Well frankly on these subjects I'm afraid there is very little. Is it necessary to say we are both repelled by cruelty and barbarity? But on his area of professional interest I have less common ground with him than with my postman (he agrees with me on Blacka Moor). Sheffield Wildlife Trust's foot soldiers may be another matter, but I guess they are expected to stick to the party line.

To summarise, institutionally Sheffield Wildlife Trust sees its job and its future as managing. It's entirely consistent with this that they highlight all evidence they can find to justify that choice, and ignore or dismiss or are indifferent to anything that tells an alternative story. There is little room in that for the complexity and untidiness of real situations. Our view is that what matters is what is not managed. SWT have considerable resources to put across their story and serve their own interests. I wonder why he should worry so much about us and this blog? I suppose it could be that he fears we are right?

* plus of course the chain saw and not forgetting the weedkiller!

Successful Defence

Early Sunday morning before sunrise with no sounds from the road. The bellows were loud and continuous. Several stags were at the top of the hill looking down.

The dominant stag with hinds was in the shadows down below making his feelings known.

Hesitation whether or not to leave his hinds but eventually he gave chase and the competion scattered.

The hinds looked on before he returned with more bellows.

The sun rose higher.

The deer went off in single file towards the woods as a few people came for the morning walk.

On The Case

Fear not all wildlife lovers, the law is on the job and the crime has been logged. Notebooks have come out of pockets and the incident is being taken seriously. There is a dedicated wildlife crime officer with South Yorks Police and his appearance on my doorstep yesterday morning will have had net curtains twitching all along the street. ("And they looked so respectable! Who would have thought it?)

But I wish to make it clear that should I be found at some time with a pitchfork in my back I want the officer responsible for investigating my murder to be he who is currently to be seen not far away each night at the Sheffield Crucible Theatre thinly disguised as Hamlet's step father , Claudius (and also the ghost of Hamlet's father). I'm sure he'll get his man.
He is after all more experienced in this kind of crime than most.

Monopolies

It wasn’t the pleasantest start to the week, so we need to make the best of any opportunity provided for light amusement. Not surprisingly it comes from the welcome contribution of SWT’s Chief Executive. Who would have thought that simply walking on the moor each day could provide such a range of experiences from spiritual nourishment to being confronted with evidence of the worst aspects of humanity. But now we should add high comedy.

Just imagine Terry Leahy, CEO of Tesco (now stepping down) lecturing a one-man corner shopkeeper, saying that he (the small shopkeeper) didn’t have a monopoly on the retail trade. Think about it. Then read Nigel’s comment, saying to this blog: “ You don’t have the monopoly on recognising the splendour of our native wildlife....” First, have I ever said I did? But wait a bit. Sheffield Wildlife Trust’s turnover is, I think, several million pounds. It is itself only part of a conglomerate of similar organisations with considerable resources that seems intent on swallowing up as much of our countryside as it can and managing it according to very top down practices. SWT itself is busy building an empire by expanding its operations. Yet 10 years after pleading to be given a lease on Blacka Moor they still know only a fraction of what goes on here and refuse to allocate resources to provide an on site warden. They work 9 to 5 on weekdays remotely based at their headquarters with occasional trips out to monitor or survey something. SWT is run as a business and I’m sure there are organisational benefits for them but when they took over the site people did not expect that it would be just another organisation like Streetforce, or as my original analogy Tesco - though their hours are somewhat longer. Incidentally it’s Sir Terry Leahy – any ideas?
Meanwhile this blog does not run at a profit. We don’t even advertise. In fact it costs us to blog. Yet the message that comes from Nigel is that SWT has to promote their way of working presumably through their publicity department in order to put the ‘alternative’ view from what we say here. For goodness sake!

Leaflet

This is a copy of the text of SWT's leaflet which you can find in various green boxes around Blacka. By clicking on it you can get a bigger picture. You will be able to see that there is not even a passing reference to deer or even any wild mammal. Yet very common birds like pipits and chiff chaffs are mentioned and some of the common vegetation. If I'm the only one who thinks this is odd or that it says something about SWT then I'll stand in the bog for 5 minutes with water and mud over my boots. See comment from Nigel under previous post.

How Dear are Deer to SWT, and Nigel?

Further to the deer killing atrocity and the comment from Nigel who is of course Chief Executive of SWT, I’m grateful for his expression of outrage The police comments, apparently reported to Nigel twice removed, may or may not result from experience from a number of incidents, or may be a desire not to see anything sinister at another level. That’s hard for me to say, but as yet I’m not convinced. To see a severed animal head facing me just where I get out of my car in the morning - as is known to numerous people - shortly after I’ve made some of the comments I have, may not be proof of anything. But anyone dismissing the association out of hand would need to explain why the other two notices (from the wildlife trust) were left undisturbed.

I’m interested in Nigel’s dismissal of Mark’s comment above his. Yes, what Mark says is strong and the reaction from Nigel is not unexpected. But I think we should all look more deeply into what’s behind it. I think I’m in a good position to evaluate SWT’s attitude to the deer and to wild animals generally. There’s no substitute for observation year on year and day by day which is what this blog tries to do. Anyway, I’ve watched a gradual change in the attitude of people at SWT to the deer since 2006. At that time they were at best ambivalent, reflecting division of opinion among wildlife conservationists. Some conservationists thought deer very much a bad thing. One of these was the Natural England officer then responsible for this area. He made his feelings very clear at the Icarus consultation in 2005. No, he certainly did not want deer. These wild animals were too much their own masters with their own agenda that didn’t fit in with the conservationist blueprint. And in obedience to this authority the SWT people took their cue from him. Consequently we were impressed and taken aback over and again by the absence of any reference to deer in their publicity and their paperwork of which, believe me, there was no shortage, and in the tentative way they responded to any mention of the deer.
It would not have surprised me, if I had followed Nigel round the country at wildlife trust junkets and awaydays, to hear him telling his fellow wildlife trust directors (they only elevated themselves to Chief Execs. later on) how marvellous was SWT’s ‘very own’ moorland at Blacka with its bird assemblage but never mentioning the red deer.
All of this time I was seeing and recording on this blog some stunning wildlife sights involving Britains largest native wild animal. Yet little or no mention from SWT. Why? Was it due to the deep seated orthodoxy in the local conservationists that could not reconcile itself to the free-spirited independence of these beautiful animals – creatures that refused to be controlled? It was at this time I read the article by SWT’s Reserve Manager in the local Totley Independent with frank disbelief. Coming down from a gorgeous morning in some wild and romantic scenery and having watched a group of stags, I settled down to read the article titled “Beautiful Beasts of Blacka Moor”. By the time I had read to the end I was wondering whether we were living on the same planet. The beasts mentioned in the title were not deer but a herd of cattle which at that time had never been anywhere near Blacka! This article crystallised everything that was cockeyed about SWT and its policy makers. About that time they produced a very smart looking leaflet with text and map about ‘their nature reserve’ at Blacka Moor indicating the great wildlife that could be enjoyed here. But the pictures were of bird watchers and cattle, none of deer and not even any mention of them. The truth is they didn’t know what to think of deer because they were waiting for some official top down permission to approve them or not.
I started to comment on this blog on this strange divergence of view and it may be that I scored the odd point or two. But more than that, over a period of time SWT seemed to find it increasingly difficult to sustain this position that the deer were somehow quite separate to the real value and appeal of Blacka. This was hard for them because The deer were uniquely associated with the wilder aspects of Blacka. Their problem was that they could hardly disapprove of the deer when the public so obviously loved them far more than the tatty looking sheep or the extravagantly defecating cattle. Also, SWT were going round from door to door soliciting subscriptions from local people some of whom had seen the deer and loved them or seen pictures from this blog. It also happened that some newer and younger people were recruited to SWT who had a different attitude to the deer. Quite simply, they liked them. How they could do otherwise I don’t know. But I remain in doubt about whether they were running counter to the institutional view. Just lately SWT have started to use pictures of the deer in presentations. Well, it's a welcome change, but we should not delude ourselves that this is from conviction. It is born of calculation and opportunism. It would not do for them to be so against the grain of popular opinion. Not for an organisation reliant on membership fees.


The point I’m making here is that there has been an anti-deer undercurrent, not always expressed in the open and that it is a phenomenon that runs alongside strong opinions amongst some farmers. At a recent consultation farmer after farmer called for a cull of the deer. At that point I dared to respond with a not totally serious call for a cull of farm animals, which were a danger on the roads quite as much as deer. I said at that time that I might finish up with a pitchfork in my back. So far that has not happened. But we have now seen a deer’s head in the car park.
Conservationists may feel the need to appease the farming industry. But they need to be careful that their priority is wild animals. That's certainly not been clear up to now.