Our Environment Minister Owen Paterson was recently talking about Pillar 2 support for farmers who struggle in less favoured areas but with beautiful landscapes. Tourism brings in £33 billion per annum and it seemed reasonable to Mr Paterson that the tax payer should help farmers to finance rebuilding stone walls, controlling predators and keeping down bracken.
My wife and I have just been round Mr and Mrs Layland Branfield's beautiful Moorlands Farm, on the Duchy Estate at Princetown and the week before Geoff Eyre's Howden Moor in the Peak district. They both echoed the Minister's views. Layland says he has less heather and ground-nesting birds than 15 years ago. The increase in predators and lack of support for regular swaling of heather heathland on Dartmoor has reduced numbers of wildlife by a high percentage.
There are gamekeepers and regular swaling of heather in the New Forest and on other National Park Moors in the North of England.
Ian Fugler from Natural England has been to Howden Moor and seen the wonderful birdlife and increased biodiversity. This is echoed by the Young Gamekeeper of the year from Newton Rigg, who says that he is working on Wemmergill Moor in the North of England at present surrounded by thousands of lapwing nesting alongside curlews and golden plover and other ground nesting birds. They carry out rigorous control of predators and with dual-wheeled tractor and cutter can carry out 60 to 70 burns in a day when in the old days 15 burns were normal with floggers.
Foxes are well noted for their egg predation and with their prodigious hearing as well as sense of smell can hear chicks that are tapping at the inside of the egg shell prior to birth from far away. Robert Lloyd's (South west England manager) opinion is that badgers only eat eggs if they stumble on them. Swedish scientific research has found a lowering of nest survival if they are close to badger setts. Minimal survival up to 400 metres!
Geoff Eyre was saying that he had seen 26 ravens flying methodically crossing nesting grounds on a hill taking anything foxes and badgers had left before they had started rigorous predator control.
The Duchy is involved as the landowner. When John Loch was the MOD land agent a few years ago and there were intensive efforts to improve waders numbers including lapwing, snipe, dunlin, curlew and golden plover numbers were improved in MOD areas but there was opposition to swaling from DNPA and Natural England. RSPB even insisting that crows could not be destroyed unless you could prove which crow had taken a ground-nesting bird's egg! The Duchy also had grouse moors in the 1930s and there are still a few grouse to be seen but much heather is leggy and not maintained (opposite Warren House Inn) and bracken can be shoulder height hiding stone walls and bronze age villages.