Moors, woods and hares

Grouse moor management has been much criticised recently for its alleged role in the decline of the Mountain hare with critics demanding an end to driven grouse shooting and often insisting on rewilding or native tree planting as a replacement. However life is just not that simple.

A couple of months ago I sent a Freedom of Information (FOI) request to Scottish Natural Heritage (SNH) for the details of every license granted to cull Mountain Hares out of season since 2012. Mountain hares can be shot in season without control by authorised agents of the landowner. However they are protected by a close season when they are breeding. To kill them in the close season a license from SNH is required.

I strongly suspected based on anecdotes and general knowledge that the role of Forestry interests in culling mountain hares was significantly under reported. Get a couple of pints into a forester and get them started on hares one day and you’ll see why. There is no requirement to record in season cull totals for mountain hares so it is very difficult to know what is going on with hares in forestry, but I thought the out of season culls would give an indication.

When the information came back from SNH my hunch seemed to be borne out, the legal justification for all of the culls was the same “Preventing serious damage to livestock, foodstuffs for livestock, crops, vegetables, fruit, growing timber, fisheries or inland waters”. None of the licenses were granted for the control of disease or for the protection of wild birds, which suggested they were not being granted to prevent ticks on hares spreading louping ill to grouse.

One particular project stood out for the number and persistence of its out of season culls “The Auchtertipper New Native Woodland”. A licence to kill hares out of season for this woodland appeared for every year since 2012 with the exception of 2013. In 2012 the licence allowed the out of season killing of 400 hares, though only 86 were actually killed. In total since 2012, 651 hares were shot out of season to protect this woodland.

The name Auchtertipper meant nothing to me, so I hit the Google! This turned up a few things, firstly Auchtertipper popped up in a set of forestry forum minutes as a successful SRDP (Scottish Rural Development Programme) project, so this was, at least partly, publicly funded. My google search threw up a previous FOI report which gave some interesting additional details. The details of the 2012 licence carried the note “Unable to snare due to high snow levels for much of licence period so shooting also used.” The license allowed not just shooting but also snaring of pregnant hares and of hares with dependent offspring, nice!

Even more interesting was the note against the 2015 licence “Hares shot under licence in fenced areas by two controllers to prevent further damage to new woodlands. During open season 270 hours contracted hare shooting, 173 hares shot. Fences checked and maintained monthly.” It would appear that in 2015 196 hares were shot out of season at Auchtertipper and an additional 173 were shot in season, a total of 369 hares in a single year.

The next thing thrown up by google was that Auchtertipper  was highly commended in the Woodland Trust Woodlands awards in 2014. Their mention in these awards then gave me the location “Auchtertipper near Carrbridge, Inverness-shire”. So I went looking for a map. Before the tree planting took place an archaeological survey was conducted  and that survey we recorded on Canmore.org.uk  I verified this was the correct location using the full original archaeological report. Helpfully the Canmore entry had a map from before the planting!

What immediately struck me was the lines of grouse butts, this used to be a grouse moor. It was the dream of the rewilders and anti grouse shooting campaigners come true, a publicly funded, award winning native-woodland replacing a grouse moor. The problem is that, so far, it has required the deaths of at least 800 mountain hares and if the 2015 cull totals are indicative possibly many many more. Remember that we were recently told (somewhat questionably ) that the mountain hare is now at 1% of its 1950s levels on moorland in the eastern highlands.

I don’t blame the owners. The reality is that any form of land use is a set of trade offs there are no situations which are wins for all species. If you want trees you can’t have mountain hares, they will eat your trees. So you have to kill them. In time a woodland will grow up and become unsuitable as hare habitat anyway. That is the big difference between grouse moor and forestry for hares. On a grouse moor hares may be regularly shot, but they will always have a suitable habitat to sustain them. In a woodland they will be intensely shot until the habitat becomes unsuitable and excludes them.

It’s just not as easy as ‘ban grouse shooting and save hares’.