"Help Protect Our Jobs"

It's the A4 laminated notice season again.

The appeal to dog owners to stop their dogs straying onto areas where SWT would like to see Nightjar nest (and Black Grouse!!) is something of a poisoned chalice. If it so happened that these birds arrived it would eventually be a serious restriction for dog walking generally here and SWT knows it.Much more so than cattle grazing. There would be a ratcheting up of pressure and a gradual erosion of the freedom that people and their dogs enjoy. I recognise that not every dog walker is as responsible as he/she might be, but that can be said of most activities and most people. I also think that it is irresponsible and disingenuous of managers like the one writing this notice to go about this back-door way of controlling dog walkers and (which is what it amounts to) discouraging them from coming here. Considering the huge amount of public land in this part of Sheffield it should be easy to find somewhere in the hills to walk with a dog but people have been restricted to places like this part of Blacka because sheep graze everywhere else.

The question of ground-nesting birds is an important one that never gets put into perspective. The NGO landscape managers have a personal vested interest in the totally artificial landscapes that are favoured by ground nesting birds because they need intervention from managers and help to get them farm subsidies. A wilder landscape and a more diverse and natural balance of wildlife would not give them that security. They get the idea for this focus on open landscapes and the birds that like them from grouse moor managers and gamekeepers who have contrived to discourage or kill off all the predators that might cause problems for the ground nesters of which the main one is red grouse. They have hit upon a perfect model for their role in life: keep wild nature out, put on farm livestock, rake in farm subsidies and protect managers jobs. It's a giant scam.

Don’t forget either the statement that the ‘habitat is suitable’ for Nightjar and Black Grouse. Why is that? One reason is that there has been a great deal of killing of native wildlife by the wildlife trust to make it suitable. Approaching a hundred trees were poisoned in this vicinity.

The corpses of a few of them can still be found. It’s another illustration of the truth that all habitat creation is also habitat destruction. And it’s worth thinking what ground nesting birds did when lynx and wolf roamed before they were persecuted by land managers as was the polecat.