Private landowners make better conservationists

By Matt Ridley.

"The Duke of Norfolk is best known for presiding over the coronation as hereditary Earl Marshall, but what really gets him excited is a native farmland bird, the grey partridge. Nearly 20 years ago he was appalled to learn from the veteran ecologist Dick Potts that the species was down to its last three pairs on his estate in Sussex and about to go extinct.

He decided to do something about it. Today the Peppering estate has around 300 pairs of partridges as well as corn buntings, lapwings, rare butterflies, long lost cornfield flowers and other wildlife. Last year the duke brought curlew eggs south from the Pennines and hatched them off to try to re-establish the species on the South Downs.

This story is told in a charming new book “Return of the Grey Partridge” by Roger Morgan-Grenville and “Eddie” Norfolk, and is an example of a new trend for private landowners to do pioneering conservation work on a scale that often dwarfs and sometimes shames the wildlife conservation charities that get more media attention.

Philip Merricks is another example. He inherited a large arable farm at Elmley on the Isle of Sheppey but when it was designated as a site of special scientific interest 43 years ago because of its importance for breeding lapwings and redshank, he was offered compensation only for things he was not going to be allowed to do, rather than for doing anything positive for conservation.

He pestered the government, saying: if you want me to farm lapwings instead of corn, I can do so but you have to let me do it actively. After a lot of discussion with those who thought he should just go on farming but badly, he won support to do it his way. By digging scrapes, managing water levels, controlling crows and foxes, excluding badgers and grazing cattle at the right times, he has steadily built up the lapwing population to an astounding 350 pairs, and the redshanks to 400, alongside scores of other rare breeding birds. In May, as I can attest, Elmley is an avian Serengeti. In winter, it holds more than 25,000 wigeon and more than 100 harriers.

In 2010 independent monitors calculated that while Elmley’s lapwings were producing 1.33 chicks per pair per year, the lapwings on the neighbouring land run by the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds were producing just 0.11 chicks per pair per year, not enough to replace adult deaths. One reserve was a population source, the other a population sink. Eventually, the RSPB turned the management of their patch over to Merricks.

Merricks enlisted the ornithologist Professor Ian Newton to argue that for ground-nesting birds, conventional environmental policies focused on habitat improvement but not predation control were – and still are — worse than doing nothing. They create an “ecological trap”, by luring lapwings to good habitat, where their eggs and chicks are gobbled up by crows and foxes year after year. Like Peppering, Elmley is now incubating and releasing young curlews with the hope that they will return to breed successfully.

Then there is Holkham, the estate of the Earl of Leicester in north Norfolk. Its eight miles of coast and extensive salt marshes were always a magnet for geese, ducks and wading birds. In the mid 1800s, the second earl of Leicester created a sanctuary for the geese. But when the marshes were declared a national nature reserve in 1967, a succession of government agencies took over the management and focused on passively “protecting” rather than actively encouraging the wildlife.

Frustrated by this, in 2012 Lord Leicester ended Natural England’s lease, believing his team could do a better job of managing the nature reserve themselves. The quango’s panjandrums were gobsmacked by this impertinence, arguing that the estate lacked qualified staff and would ruin the place.

Instead, under the leadership of the former gamekeeper and writer Jake Fiennes, Holkham National Nature Reserve has seen a steady increase in the number of birds both wintering and breeding. Vast and growing numbers of pink-footed geese and wigeon use the reserve in winter, as I saw in January, while in summer the numbers of breeding cormorants, herons, little egrets, marsh harriers, oystercatchers, avocets and bearded tits have all increased. They were joined in 2016 by great white egrets and in 2019 by cattle egrets. Rarest of all, the number of young spoonbills fledged on the reserve has increased from 10 in 2010 to 90 in 2023. This is their largest British breeding site.

The reserve attracts about a million visitors a year, whose car parking fees and donations help pay for the conservation work. Together with income from cattle grazing and grants, the estate has made conservation into a commercially respectable, though not lucrative, proposition.

There are two features that Leicester, Merricks and Norfolk bring to the management of their land that differ from the way wildlife trusts or the RSPB manage their reserves. The first is the scale of active intervention. These are not purist “rewilders”, who see their role as getting human beings out of the way of nature. They dig scrapes, plant hedges, graze cattle, alter water levels, sow crops for pollinators and bird feed, and generally interfere. So do some NGO conservation charities but usually with less determination and enthusiasm.

The second difference is the scale of predator control. Again some NGOs do this but usually with reluctance and they try not to talk about it. Private-sector conservationists, by contrast, work day and night during the spring and early summer to rid their land of as many crows, foxes, stoats and rats as possible, knowing that anything less than zero tolerance is disastrous for ground-nesting birds. Predator control would probably not be necessary if Britain was a pristine wilderness, but in a world where human activity subsidises these animals it is vital. The five gamekeepers at Peppering, for instance, have a target to kill 200 rats each during the spring, and it is a Sisyphean task.

Not all landowners are so green-tinged, but nor are these the only aristocrats doing private conservation. A healthy rivalry is driving others to keep up with the Howards. The Duke of Northumberland’s fields between Alnwick and the coast are now swarming with partridges, finches, buntings, larks, thrushes, barn owls and hares, even in winter. In Dorset, Viscount Cranborne counts the corn buntings and turtle doves thriving alongside his growing population of partridges.

In the Pennines, we grouse moor owners produce healthy surpluses every year of some of the country’s rarest birds: merlins, curlews, dunlins, golden plover and black grouse among others. These species are absent or very rare on hills that are not managed for grouse shooting: most of the Lake District and Wales for example. In Wensleydale Lord Bolton has become a passionate champion of the curlew, organising events for the public to see and hear the hundreds of pairs that nest on his moor.

Some conservationists complain that birds of prey are not so welcome on these moors, but this is increasingly out of date. In the past ten years the number of fledged hen harrier chicks in England has gone from zero to 141 and most of these were born on grouse moors. In Nidderdale, the Earl of Swinton welcomes visitors to a special hide to photograph roosting hen harriers. Managing the numbers of these birds before they destroy the very system that enables them to thrive is now an urgent issue.

The contrast between these moors and those owned by the RSPB has not gone unnoticed. In his book Moorland Matters, Ian Coghill, former chairman of the Game and Wildlife Conservation Trust, lambasts the RSPB for its management of Lake Vyrnwy, a Welsh moor that was once thick with curlew, merlin and black grouse but where all three species are now teetering on the brink of extinction. Coghill points out that the very failure of these birds to thrive is then effectively weaponised by the society in its fund-raising. In asking for £3,299,900 from the heritage Lottery Fund, the RSPB threatened that without the money “curlew, black grouse and merlin will cease to appear as a breeding species in this area of Wales”.

Of course, there is one big difference between privately run conservation projects and those run by NGOs: many of the private-sector conservationists also like to shoot birds. The Duke of Norfolk makes no secret that one of his motives in restoring the grey partridge was to generate a surplus of birds that could then be shot for sport.

Likewise, most Pennine moor owners are only “curlew farming” (as the BBC presenter Chris Packham derisively puts it) as a byproduct of encouraging red grouse to shoot. Yet the red grouse is Britain’s most unique bird and conserving it, at private expense, to the point of abundance is in itself a triumph of active conservation.

Private landowners own vastly more acres than NGOs, so any policy to help nature to recover necessarily requires their involvement. A scattering of NGO-owned and taxpayer-funded islands of diversity will not be enough. Yet when the government or its quangos draw up new rules they talk mostly to the NGOs and think mostly of how to stop bad landowners doing bad things, rather than working with good landowners to do good things. The Duke of Norfolk tells a funny, if exasperated, story about how much easier he found it to get the monarch, and even the pope, to return his calls than the official within Natural England in charge of permitting him to release curlews."