The initiative includes Ireland Moor, Beacon Hill and Bal Bach, and its primary focus is on the aim of reversing the decline of our iconic moorland bird species such as the red grouse, curlew, lapwing, and golden plover by restoring their heather moorland habitats and employing keepers. The purpose of the Sustainable Management Scheme is to support collaborative landscape scale projects taking action to improve the resilience of our natural resources and ecosystems in a way that also delivers benefits to farm businesses and rural communities.
Collaboration is identified as the key to success and much of the effort in the project is on bringing the various interests together to discuss and agree the best way forward, so that everyone gets what they need from the moors. This is done through a series of public events and surveys, to gather the knowledge and opinions of those who use, own, farm, manage and visit the three moors.
When it comes to restoring the biodiversity on these moors, a huge amount of monthly data is being recorded to help the landowners to quickly spot the key areas in which to focus their attention. Judging by the numbers of foxes and corvids being removed, predator control is clearly a key priority. However, maintaining the heather with the invasion from gorse and bracken is also a big challenge. Following advice from Dick Bartlett of British Moorlands, the project has begun to focus upon customised heather cutting and burning techniques which are designed to offset the impact of high raptor densities.
Catherine Hughes is the Project Manager and much of her time is taken up speaking with the various interests from owners, keepers and graziers to recreational and tourism interests. Catherine says “By engaging with all interested parties we can start to agree on the 80% of what we want our landscapes to look like in the future, but it takes time and commitment to get the messages across. This collaboration is a new initiative therefore we have to keep involving all interested parties and keep up the momentum and strengthen the story as we proceed and more importantly demonstrate what the outcomes are through restoration of the ground. Engagement and more engagement and constant communication is key. School visits are hugely positive especially when the kids are so enthusiastic and feel able to ask any question they like particularly as it is their community. By having gamekeepers and graziers conduct the visits our aim is to find solutions where our landscapes have a bigger and better story to tell. The children clearly enjoy having gamekeepers and graziers explain what and why they do what they do. It really can’t be taught in the classroom. It also potentially inspires them to think of what they could get involved with in the countryside as a career.”
Our aim is to get 500 local children up on the moors over the three years and develop new ways through a variety of citizen science, arts, music etc to convey the beauty of our landscape and get them to help us celebrate their importance. We need the children to feel an ownership of them and so far it has been fantastic and the message from these kinds of events get quickly communicated to a much wider audience. The moorland story is complex with so many different aspirations but we are engaging with as many stakeholders as possible to see if ultimately we can boost the biodiversity and create quality jobs to bolster the rural economy and in the process build resilience into our Welsh moorlands.”