Natural Tracery

It's usually Gothic windows that have tracery. There's always lots of symmetry and regularity in the great cathedrals. Natural tracery as seen by the human eye is wilder and more irregular. Are trees nature's cathedrals or are cathedrals humanity's attempts to emulate forests? The vivid contrasts following a snowfall leave thousands of tiny spaces that sometimes look planned but mostly obey rules that we may never understand.

Three's a Crowd

Further to the recent report on the robin at the local Bird Caff, there have been developments. Our 9 am friend has been a bit unusual this winter in tolerating if reluctantly another robin’s presence. In previous winters it’s been one or none and there has been bitter rivalry for the territory and for access to the daily handouts. It must be assumed that the second bird this year is a female, though there’s no gallantry in his treatment, just a truculent acceptance. But once or twice in the last week a third robin has been present as the food parcel arrives and that has caused serious resistance. This morning our friend came to meet me out on the moor a good 200 yards from the feeding station. He was quite insistent, perching on twigs almost underfoot. He may have been bettered by the newcomer and believe his best chance of being first to the grated cheese and mealworms would be to show he was braver than the new bird. Or it could just be that the very cold conditions are making him bolder.

I can remember one morning in a very cold winter in the sixties coming into the cowshed at 6 am for milking and seeing a robin well settled on the warm back of a shorthorn cow where he had obviously spent the night. 

You always wonder how they cope with these conditions. And what will they do?  Poor things?

It's Good For You!!

My first thought was that it must be some kind of joke or wind-up. Time and again I’ve asked why it’s necessary to sell a landscape to the people who own it unless you’re afraid that those same people need to be told what its value is – or you’re afraid they may have different ideas to your own. It came via email:

"As promised, please find attached, the first draft of the Eastern Moors Spirit of Place, or put more simply, the ‘Special Qualities’ of the Eastern Moors.  Getting the special qualities statement right is really important. It will lay the foundations for the way we look at visitor experience across the site.  It will be a statement under which we will carry out our work, ensuring that we strive to respect and celebrate the special qualities of the Eastern Moors."

Good landscape, like anything attractive, doesn’t need promoting. Follow link. Good landscape speaks for itself. The problem with the Eastern Moors is that so much of it is utterly dreary and that only those who resist it becoming beautiful – which it would if they only stopped interfering – need to bamboozle the public into thinking it’s not what they thought on their last visit. So they go in for gushing promotional copy, doubtless devoting hours of office time to this cringe inducing activity which could be devoted to patrolling the hills and dealing with problems.  

The reason for this exercise is that managers have to justify their insistence on maintaining the status quo because the genuinely worthwhile alternative needs less input from them - and would be criticised by the shooting industry and their friends high up in the land lobby - from Natural England to the government. One thing, of many, they never get right, is that they don't know how to, or don't want, the views of those who don't like the moors. The views they get are predictable because their consultees are self selecting.

Marketing hype is everywhere and utterly depressing. Sometimes you can laugh at it but in this case weary embarrassment seems the right reaction.

Similar hype you can laugh at comes from the claims made by those selling products from the deer farm in New Zealand. Apparently deer velvet is sold as a 'health supplement' and benefits include the following claims:

"Boost Strength

Increase Endurance

Anti-Aging

Reduce or Slow Signs of Aging

Improve Immune System

Reduce Stress

Accelerated Illness Recovery

Improve Athletic Performance"

It can also relieve, so we hear:

High Blood Pressure

Arthritis

Overactive Bladder

But wait, it doesn't stop there. This wonderful material will do much more for you, including making dramatic changes to your:

Male Sexual Performance

Erectile Dysfunction

Increase Interest In Sexual Activity

Increase Sex Hormones

Perhaps the local conservation outfits will soon be telling us that sexual performance is significantly improved by a visit to the local moors.  Nothing would surprise me. Boredom is said to be a spur to many things.

Winter Trees

Going into the hills in wintry conditions should be a a feast for the eyes. Heather as usual disappoints. It could be a field of cabbages, bulging and often breaking through untidily without even the smooth whiteness of a grassy field.

Woodland  easily outperforms the managed monoculture once again. Part of the attraction comes from the dramatic contrast with one side of the vertical surface white emphasising the dark on the rest of the upright. The build up of snow on the horizontals, before the wind removes it, is the greatest appeal, and looking through closely spaced trees enmeshed in this way takes the eye into a new world of patterned secrets.

Knowing Your Place

When birds fly onto your camera you get the idea they consider themselves in charge and super important. This one had an aristocratic air about him today.

And there was a bit of upstairs and downstairs at the wall later on.

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Robins are well known to be the first to try to get onto your hand. I've never quite managed the trick of telling one from another apart from an educated guess from observing behaviour traits. And they do change a lot in appearance during the summer moult. But I reckon this one is at least the fourth to have taken food from my hand at this spot. Once you've got him eating from the hand you can also pass on the pleasure to others, including children, who are of course thrilled. It may be pretty ordinary compared with TV spectaculars from Mr Attenborough but I believe nothing communicates the wonder of wildlife as well as direct contact with the wild.

Teasing View

Setting out to walk along the barbed wire is hardly something to look forward to. But there was interest in one teasing view:

another reminder of how easy it can be for the largest animals to remain disguised.

The barbed wire in places has become overgrown. That could cause problems for wildlife.

Where it's exposed there's evidence of hair on the barbs and one still wonders how the very youngest cope.

Complaints early on about the lowest strand of wire eventually led SWT to replace a low section with smooth unbarbed wire - but it was pure window dressing. The only section replaced was where they judged people would see it. 90% of it remains barbed at all four levels so somehow the message will have had to be got out to wild animals where to find the safe places.

Intervention and Non Intervention

Again the evidence piles up that decision making in the management of the moors is done following very little thinking. That's an activity the conservation industry on the land is very nervous of. What thought goes on happens behind closed doors. Thinking by and with the public is strongly discouraged.

Quoted in this post was the National Trust's response to comments on the High Peak management plan, and comments from people asking for more non-intervention.

Why did they reject the call for more non-intervention?

            "........because of the cultural, historical and social importance of the moors."

They don't claim that non intervention would mean the landscape would look worse,  nor that fewer people would enjoy it and that recreation would suffer. As for the shibboleth of biodiversity management, they say that the present species on the moors are dependent on the habitat created by grazing.  But they don't refer to the other species that would move in when a slow return to a more natural landscape happened, although there's an implied value judgement there that leads them adopting the god-role. 

The key argument they make is cultural: the words historical and social are superfluous because cultural embraces both. No definition is offered of what culture they mean so it has to be assumed it's the culture of the status quo, namely gun culture. When the National Trust take over a vast country house they make a choice of which historical/cultural period to restore it to. They rarely opt to go for just managing the property as it is left to them and just polish it up a bit. But here, in the great outdoors, they choose to do just that Why? Is it that same answer to most questions about land management: money and vested interests? It would seem so.

So we're back with the same conclusions. Our remote landscapes where nobody lives are managed because it serves the interests of a privileged group who live somewhere else. They don't look out on the place when they draw their curtains int he morning, which would at least ensure they would be keen for it to look pleasant.Because they have somewhere else which they own that they think about more. The pressure for keeping these places as they are, even going so far as to get them classified as a certain desirable landscape character, is driven by the wish of these distant people to have somewhere where they can spend a few hours each year to fire their guns at ground nesting birds in a place where there are no trees to get in the way.

That landscape character conveniently cobbled together to suit then becomes an established and immutable benchmark whereby other areas are judged. The influence of the shooting lobby then extends even onto public land, land owned not by the privileged but by the urban majority most of whom would be not very pleased to learn of the influence of those driving the policy. Hence the need for pumping resources into propaganda, slanted 'education' projects, sundry press releases and carefully structured consultation events orchestrated by conservation managers. 

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Next time you see one of those notices up on the moors telling people to 'get a grip' on their dog in the interests of ground nesting birds remember that those who lobby for these notices to be put up are those  who want the same ground-nesting birds to be around later in the year so they can be shot. It's alright for them to shoot them but not for your dog to disturb them. I've sometimes wondered why people ignore these notices. I'm beginning to understand. It's not much different to what happens with sheep. People are happy to have lambs collected together and slaughtered once they've become fat during the summer. They can then appear on their dinner plates; in the interests of those same lambs farmers may become very hostile to people exercising their dogs on the moors. In fact they are known to get very sentimental about lambs - but only when it doesn't interfere with their interests: a blind eye is often turned to what happens in the final days of the lives of farm animals. Out of sight out of mind.