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GREAT credit to Mary Colwell, who, after a great deal of lobbying, has secured a GCSE in Natural History and don’t we need it. I hope it is not treated like art has been in the past, as a second-class qualification—Nature, as is Art, are worthy qualifications. My concern is that you don’t choose your GCSEs until you are 13 and I believe that a passion for Nature starts a lot earlier and should therefore be part of early years education. Personally, I was lucky—being born and living in a small rural village in Nottinghamshire, I was immersed in Nature from a young age. We could watch barn owls hunting the orchard that surrounded our house or spend days newting in several ponds in the village fields. I picked and pressed wildflowers with my mum and found birds’ nests on my walk to and from school. Both my grandads were countrymen: one fished the other loved his rough shooting, as well as the occasional ‘one for the pot’ poaching foray. I was therefore exposed to Nature all the time—taking it all in and learning all the while. I was also fortunate that a love of Nature was encouraged in my family. Sadly, not all children are as blessed. This is where primary/junior schools can make all the difference. You can teach pupils all about Nature in the classroom, but you cannot beat the outdoor experience Nature should be smelt, felt, seen and heard—it stimulates all our senses. Nature walks are simple and effective ways of getting children out in the countryside and up close with wildlife. You don’t have to see golden eagles or beavers, there is always something going on even in the most built-up areas. A mole hill can open a whole new subterranean world, not to mention worms, beetles and soil drainage, or simply stopping, smelling and listening to the bees buzzing around a lime tree in flower. It’s all out there and it’s all happening—all it needs is enthusiastic adults to make it accessible to children. Nature walks and nature tables, which encourage youngsters to bring in Nature’s flotsam and jetsam and a cup or a prize at the end of the year is a great stimulus for children to engage with the great outdoors. Ultimately, we need more young people to understand the difference between natural history and conservation. Simon Lester

Our April conservation blog from Tracy Johnson, Nidderdale Moorland Group Co-ordinator. For those of us who live and work in the uplands of Northern England and Scotland it is a common sound of spring and summer, an iconic call that signals the coming of longer days and hopefully, warmer weather, as winter turns to spring. Yet for those who live in lowland areas of Southern England, it is a call of spring that a generation growing up today have never heard. The haunting, bubbling call of the Curlew is still an emotive sound of spring and summer in the northern upland’s, but this was once a sound heard across many other habitats, including lowland regions of the UK and Ireland away from our managed moorlands, but a sound now lost in many areas of the UK as our largest wader continues to decline at an alarming rate. About 25% of the global population of Eurasian Curlew are found in Britain and this number swells every winter as birds from Finland, Russia and other European countries come here to spend the colder months of the year in our milder climate. The British population of breeding Curlew is of global importance, but even here these iconic birds are now facing the real risk of extinction as a breeding bird. We have lost around 65% of the population of our largest breeding wader since 1970. In many lowland areas and unmanaged moorlands these birds are already near or locally extinct. It is estimated that there are less than 300 pairs now remaining below Birmingham, including on southern moorlands such as Dartmoor and Exmoor and the New Forest heaths, areas once a stronghold for these birds. Curlews are ground nesting birds of open habitats that include damp areas for feeding and places to safely nest and rear their young away from disturbance. They have a very good chance of surviving once they reach adulthood and can live for over 32 years, but many are not reaching fledging age, never mind adulthood, they are lost as eggs and young chicks, mainly to predation, both avian and mammalian. The UK Curlew population is continuing to decline and it’s breeding range is contracting from lowland areas of the UK to the northern uplands, from the Peak District, South Pennines, Forest of Bowland, North Yorkshire and North York moors to the Cheviots and Scotland, all areas that now hold the highest densities of UK Curlew populations. Ideas such as protecting nests with electric fencing won’t ever stop avian predators nor protect the chicks once they leave the nest after hatching and start wandering in search of food. Curlew chicks are precocial, they walk and feed themselves within 24 hours of hatching, moving away from the nest site whilst the parents keep watch for any signs of danger approaching. With mammalian predators, which include the Fox, Badger, Stoat, Weasel and avian predators including Carrion Crows, Lesser Black Back, Greater Black Back and Herring Gulls, Red Kites and Buzzards, the odds of successfully rearing eggs and chicks to adulthood are very much stacked against these vulnerable, ground nesting birds. Gulls, especially, are proving a large problem for Curlews as these birds have gradually moved inland to both feed and breed due to problems around their own coastal habitats and loss of traditional feeding areas at sea, and this also includes the inland closure of landfill sites as we have moved to waste incineration. Traditional scavengers such as the Common Buzzard, Red Kite and Carrion Crow have also increased their predation of vulnerable ground nesting species due to the loss of dead stock on farms and the noticeable drop in the UK rabbit population caused by RHD2 disease which has reduced traditional food resources for these birds and as the populations of these top predators continues to increase, so the pressure on other vulnerable species such as the Curlew has increased dramatically as the predators switch to higher predation levels of vulnerable ground nesting specie’s. Modern agricultural practices such as silaging mean that fields are drained and converted to fast growing grasslands that can be mown several times a season, replacing traditional hay meadows only mown once a year, and with a pair of Curlew requiring approximately 10 weeks to successfully rear and fledge their chicks, many are now lost due to accidents with modern farm machinery. One of the greatest threats to Curlew’s habitats today is alongside rewilding landscapes, the push to plant trees and create woodlands which are the ideal habitat for predators of the Curlew and other ground nesting species and which also use up and dry out land that was once an open and damp habitat, vital for Curlews and many other waders. Curlews prefer not to nest within 500 meters of woodlands, and as site faithful breeding birds, returning year after year to the same nest site or area of their birth, this loss of habitat and increase of predators from afforestation and rewilding is exacerbating and driving the loss of these birds at an alarming rate. It has been estimated that to just maintain the current population, not increase it, we need these birds to successfully fledge a further 10,000 chicks each year in addition to those already reaching adulthood in the wild population. Head starting Curlew eggs and chicks is an expensive technique that is being trialled at present, but it is not the answer to increasing the population as the 10,000 extra chicks needed now to maintain the present population cannot be reared this way and any birds successfully returned to the wild from head starting projects will still struggle to raise any young unless all the issues facing the Curlew today are addressed, including effective predation control. In recent years the plight of the Curlew has become more widely recognised and now several groups and organisations have been formed or come on board to highlight the issues facing these iconic birds. However well-intentioned these groups are, unfortunately clipboards, surveys and monitoring projects will not stop the dramatic free fall we now see in the Curlew population. Today the Curlew is seen as the bird of highest conservation concern in the UK. On the Red List of Conservation Concern (BOCC5) and the global Red List (as Near Threatened) since 2015 (www.iucnredlist.org) Current estimates suggest that there are approximately 58,000 breeding pairs in the UK, but these birds are not distributed evenly. It is no surprise to see the highest densities in areas which include grouse moor management as the Curlew has been found to be up to five times more successful at rearing young to fledging in these areas, benefitting from the habitat management and predator control work of gamekeepers. Predation control is an emotive subject for some people, but alongside habitat management, it is also one of the main ways to ensure the Curlew, and many other vulnerable ground nesting species, have a future as a breeding bird across many habitats in the UK, both in the uplands and lowland areas. Considerable efforts are now required to halt the continuing decline of this iconic wader. We know why these birds are declining, we know where the greatest losses are and more importantly, we know what these birds require now to stop this decline. It’s time to stop monitoring the Curlew into extinction. For more information go to www.gwct.org.uk A Future For Curlew and Waders on the Fringe factsheets are available from the GWCT.

When you ask any country person what animal is associated with March, it is more likely than not that they will say the hare, and more than just a hare, the Mad March Hare. Hares are much loved animals but most of the time their nocturnal lifestyle and their normally secretive daytime behaviour makes them so difficult to find that many people have only seen them on a screen. If you want to see hares, March is definitely the month to do it. This is because the increasing day length triggers their mating behaviour, (which to us seems mad) and in March many of the arable crops such as wheat are still short enough for us to see what is going on. Later in the year they may still be just as mad but they will be hidden by the growing crops. The madness consists of pairs or groups of hares careering about, chasing each other at high speed, twisting and turning, with the leader stopping every now and again to stand on her hind legs and batter her followers with her front feet. We say her, for two reasons. First, it is the rural convention to refer to all hares as her or she, whatever their actual sex. Second, in this instance, the leading hare is female, in spite of normally being the largest animal in the group. Another oddity of brown hares is that females (called Jills) are usually bigger than males and often very aggressive towards the pursuing males (Jacks). There are lots of odd facts about the hares you can see chasing each other through the corn in March. For instance they are, surprisingly, not native to the British Isles. When the last Ice-Age ended our hares ancestors survived in several thousand miles away near what is now the Caspian Sea. They spread slowly westward but did not arrive in time to reach us on dry land before the melting ice flooded what we call the Channel and made us an island. They were brought here by Gaulish tribes in pre-Roman times. Not only did the Gauls enjoy hunting them, they used them for divination and even worshipped a God called Eoster (the root of our Easter) who took the shape of a hare. Another oddity is that hares spend all their lives above ground. Most small mammals will use holes for shelter or to protect their young, think of a badgers sett, a foxes earth, or a rabbits burrow. All a hare has is a form. A shallow scrape in the ground in which it lies, and in which its young are born. No matter the weather, the hare and its young (leverets) just have to put up with it. On the plus side the leverets are born well developed compared to most mammals. Their eyes are open and they are fully furred and can eat solid food almost from birth, although their mother suckles them once a day (at evening) for a short time. Despite this they are extraordinarily vulnerable, to both weather and predation. Late snow or heavy, prolonged rain will kill them, and their only defence against predators such as foxes, crows, and stoats, is their camouflage, if they are discovered there is little hope of escape. Hares are not evenly abundant across the UK. They are generally less common in the wetter, colder north and west, and more common in the drier south and east. They tend to be most abundant on the estates of East Anglia where farming makes habitat concessions to game management and gamekeepers carry out the legal control of common predators. Hares are grazing animals and need a variety of vegetation to ensure that they can find nutritious food at the right height for them to eat. These are the same conditions that favour game birds, and so the habitat management for them, coincidently helps the hares. Nationally the hare has suffered from farm specialisation, where, instead of the older systems of largely mixed farming, with each farm having livestock and arable crops, they are now all dairy or all arable. This means that whilst there is plenty of food for hares at certain times of the year, there may be none at critical periods. On arable farms, perhaps surprisingly, this can be in the summer, when you might think that there is lots of food, but if it is all tall, weed free wheat and barley, too tall for hares and leverets to graze, they can starve in the midst of apparent plenty. The reduction in the numbers of full time game keepers has also had an effect. Research shows that a single fox family can eat the entire leveret production in their area. If you add to this the impact of crows and other predators, in simplified agricultural environments, hares can have a difficult time. The Game and Wildlife Conservation Trust has done a great deal of research into the problems hares face in the modern rural landscape and has published much of it in peer reviewed scientific papers. As a result we know what needs to be done to conserve hares, and happily, it is not unachievable at reasonable cost and trouble. Several government funded 'agri-environment' options available to farmers, can make a huge difference. Planting wild bird seed mixes, cover crops, beetle banks, hedgerows and grass margins can be done by any farmer, not just those who run shoots. All will help create the habitat mosaic that suits hares. If these are combined with efficient and timely predator control the chances of conserving hares in sustainable numbers rise even further. So there is still a good chance in many areas, if you walk quietly through the March countryside, that you may still see the Mad March hares doing what comes naturally. (Anyone wanting to know more about hares and their conservation than is contained in this short article can learn more from the 32-page report, A Future for brown hares, which is available free at gwct.org.uk/brownhares gwct.org.uk/brownhare) Written by Ian Coghill

Mountain hare densities in the Peak District could be five times higher than previous estimates, according to new findings. The study, led by the Game & Wildlife Conservation Trust (GWCT), utilised a new counting methodology developed in Scotland alongside the James Hutton Institute and NatureScot (formerly Scottish Natural Heritage). This is now considered the best practice standard to survey this iconic but nocturnal species. Read more here

In an article written by Dr Eckhard Gottschalk, University of Göttingen and Dr Francis Buner, The Game and Wildlife Conservation Trust (GWCT) we learn more about the grey partridge, one of the very few bird species in Europe that stays in a family group through the most part of winter. Around Valentine’s Day, love is in the air, also for partridges. At this time of year, they get very restless and vocal Read more here

This month GWCT's Megan Lock takes a look at the Long Eared Owl. Said to be our most nocturnal owl, the long-eared owl is seldomly seen hunting during daylight hours. The long-eared owl has mottled orange-brown feathers, distinct white eyebrows and striking orange eyes. It has large ‘ear tufts’, which are normally flattened but become raised when the owl is alarmed. Read more here

Following on from the first two videos, author of the recently published Moorland Matters, Ian Coghill, sits down with Emily Graham to discuss some of the issues raised by his book in the final episode. Ian Coghill interview - Part 3 The essence of a shoot day, the reality of what we all do and enjoy vs what is perceived on social media. Our thanks to Emily Graham for her fab interview and video footage.

Author of the recently published Moorland Matters, Ian Coghill, sits down with Emily Graham to discuss some of the issues raised by his book. The first two video interviews can be seen here: Ian Coghill interview - Part 1 In part one Emily and Ian discuss his book, how to proactively support the shooting community and some of the problems facing the community today. Ian Coghill interview - Part 2 Emily and Ian discuss some of the conservation industries organisations and what they are doing wrong! COP 26, regulators and much more!!

Brian Hayes from the NGO’s charity the Educational Trust urges you as ‘wildlife wardens’ to spread the word by inviting others to see your work. In 2022 the National Gamekeepers’ Organisation celebrates its 25th anniversary so now is the time for all keepers to help get the message of gamekeeping and conservation working hand to hand together. Members of the National Gamekeepers’ Organisation will already know that gamekeepers understand conservation more than most and how gamekeeping and conservation are symbiotically linked. The image of gamekeeping is changing with many estates already re-branding their keepers as ‘Conservation Managers’, ‘Wildlife Rangers’ or ‘Countryside Custodians’. The work that these keepers do on the ground, however, is not massively different – even though the job title might be. Gamekeepers have been sustainably managing land for conservation and protecting rare wildlife for many years. Now this message needs to get out. The NGO Educational Trust has been working with an organisation called Countryside Learning to help rural estates to ‘spread the word’ on countryside matters since 1998. Countryside Learning takes around 30,000 children on countryside visits every year and the areas covered are food providence, the work of countryside managers (including gamekeepers) and the importance of nature and landscape. The organisation believes that the countryside will be better protected, and its way of life supported, if people understand its value; understanding its value starts with education. People are increasingly disconnected to rural life. If they are disconnected, they won’t care. We all need them to care to protect the future of rural life. There is a large demand from schools for countryside visits. All Countryside Learning days (which are free for schools to attend) are fully booked. Working with partner organisations such as the NGO-ET (as well as the NFU, BASC, regional moorland groups and others), Countryside Learning educates children and inspires them. We all want children to be curious about the countryside and understand how management of the land affects wildlife and the different, often conflicting pressures in the countryside such as food production, maximising biodiversity and providing recreation. The NGO-ET is urging estate owners and gamekeepers to host a ‘countryside classroom day’, with the support of Countryside Learning, to showcase the day-to-day conservation work being carried out by gamekeepers on lowland estates. If you are proud of the work you do and would like to spread the word, please contact the NGO-ET or Countryside Learning, who will help to devise a plan for your educational visit.

GWCT's Megan Lock discusses blackthorn, her Species of the Month. Blackthorn is a thorny shrub that can cause nasty wounds if left untreated and has a lot of dark folklore and legends attached, but is fantastic in many other ways too… Read more here

What the Science Says has checked out another claim that comes from a number of news articles and websites that are claiming - There are around 75% more wild bees on organic farms. The research suggests there are a number of factors to be considered. Read the full response on the GWCT What the Science Says website here:

In the UK, freshwater corridors such as rivers have been altered and modified by humans for centuries. Rivers and streams have been straightened, channelised and constrained for agriculture, domestic and industrial water supply, energy generation, and flood defence purposes. This has disrupted both natural river processes and the wildlife that inhabit these areas. Freshwater habitats are globally threatened and so there is a need to restore rivers, but this is very expensive, costing from around £2 million to around £26 million per km2. Reintroducing beavers is viewed as a natural method, or ‘Nature Based Solution’, to this problem, offering a low-cost, self-sustaining method of restoring rivers. Beavers are considered ecosystem engineers as they modify both aquatic and riverside habitats. Read more here