The Conservation Prison - Feral: Rewilding the Land, the Sea, and Human Life - page 217

ain and Europe are an artefact of grazing; they are all species which
can survive in the scoured, open habitats humans have created and
that some conservationists now seek to preserve, in order - with dizzy-
ing circularity - to protect the species which can survive here.
Of the four, the red grouse is the animal whose conservation best
encapsulates the madness of current policy. It has no European conser-
vation listing, because Europe contains so many of them. They are
sufficiently abundant in Britain for thousands to be shot here every year
and served, almost raw, in gentlemen's clubs and smart restaurants.
The number of red grouse in this country is sustained through the
ruthless persecution of far rarer animals: the predatory birds and
mammals that might reduce their numbers. So valuable is grouse
shooting that even when this persecution is illegal and invokes (in the-
ory, though seldom in practice) stiff penalties, it persists. Tests
conducted by the Scottish government found that golden eagles, red
kites, peregrines and a white-tailed sea eagle whose corpses were
found on grouse-shooting estates had been poisoned. 11 Enough golden
eagles were being killed to prevent Scotland's population (the only
breeding population in Britain) from recovering. The white-tailed
eagle was one of those reintroduced to Scotland at great expense and
trouble, which have begun to establish a fragile clawhold on parts of
the coast. One gamekeeper, on the Skibo estate in Sutherland, was
caught in possession of enough carbofuran - a banned pesticide - to
kill all the birds of prey in Scotland six times over. Three dead golden
eagles were found on the estate; so was a dead grouse, pinned to a
metal stake and saturated with carbofuram, which had evidently been
laid out as bait. He was fined just £3,300. 12
Red grouse are also maintained by a programme of cutting and
burning which keeps the heather moorlands free from most other
plants and ensures that there are plenty of young shoots for the birds
to eat. This programme shuts out many of the other bird species which
might have lived on the uplands.
So it is puzzling and disturbing to discover that the wildlife trust
which manages the Glaslyn reserve describes red grouse as 'one of our
key indicator species'. 13 An indicator of what? Its answer is 'the health
of an upland landscape'. But what, in this context, does health mean?
The red grouse is to the uplands what the magpie is to the lowlands: