Something has happened to the RSPB. It used to be different. If you take just one topic to simplify things, say moorland management, not long ago the RSPB was happy to join the Langholm Project, to discover how a healthy hen harrier population and the environmental, social and economic benefits of driven grouse shooting could co-exist.

If the RSPB had believed what it now claims, there would have been absolutely no point in taking part. The same people, who were happy to burn heather and kill corvids, and who complained keepers weren’t killing enough foxes, now call identical land, managed in precisely the same way, ‘industrial landscapes’.

What has happened? First, is the RSPB’s evolution into an enormous brand. When their annual budget was a few million, the RSPB was often a helpful partner and listened to its own people on the ground and the wider countryside. Those days are gone. RSPB is now a £157.6 million a year business, making £15 million surplus with assets of £278 million. It absorbs over a million pounds every three days, and has developed attitudes and behaviours of an aggressive business. Stand in its way and you get crushed.

The RSPB has decided that grouse shooting is in its way. This is not because grouse moor management is bad. A common misconception is that if moor owners can demonstrate that they are sequestering carbon, producing pure drinking water, reducing wildfire risk, maintaining rich and rare ecosystems and species, fledging lots of rare ground-nesting birds and have a pair of hen harriers for good measure, the RSPB will be delighted. There is no evidence that this is the case. They will still say that this demi-paradise is an industrial landscape.

How can I say that? Well, the outcomes listed above, and many more, are a commonplace consequence of grouse moor management, yet, despite these demonstrable and irreplaceable benefits, the RSPB has said that if the grouse moor community does not mend its ways, it will, in the next two years, campaign for a ban on grouse shooting.

There are several probable reasons for the RSPB’s decision to attack a long-standing and successful form of upland management and the community and culture it supports.

Let’s start with what they say are the reasons: lead shot; heather burning; and raptors – hen harriers in particular. But surely, lead shot is being phased out, heather burning is tightly controlled by law and hen harriers are, thanks to the brood management scheme, increasing rapidly and, in places, exceeding SPA targets.

It seems that, as far as the RSPB is concerned, none of this makes any difference. Forget phasing out; failing to stop when they said stop, is a sign of bad faith. All burning, legal or not, must stop, and don’t annoy them by talking about ameliorating wildfire risk. As for hen harriers, having tried to wreck the recovery plans, they are now in denial as to its success. On the wider issue of the illegal killing of raptors, they ignore the zero tolerance policy of all the shooting organisations and the sea change in attitude that has taken place across the uplands, and make final eradication harder by lumping the vast majority of law abiding with the residual offenders.

It would make far more sense for the RSPB to be celebrating progress rather than becoming ever more aggressive. Any reasonable organisation would consider a different approach. They could recognise the increase in harrier numbers and the enthusiastic support of the gamekeepers and owners involved. They might congratulate the shooting organisations on their decision to move away from lead and take the trouble to understand why moving faster is simply not an option. They could discuss the tools needed to manage moorland and keep carbon stores safe, and they might learn from the success of others in preventing the wildfires that ravage their own land.

But they won’t. If the stated reasons don’t justify the remorseless demonisation of a community and its culture, what is driving this abysmal campaign?

We should start by remembering what is at stake. Heather moorland is one of the rarest habitats in the world, far rarer than rainforests and we have more of it than any other country. It mostly survives because its owners like grouse shooting. They refused successive governments’ offers of huge grants to turn it into farmland, plant trees on it and wreck it in a variety of ways. As a consequence of their use as grouse moors these places store vast amounts of carbon, support some of the largest assemblages of rare ground- nesting birds in the UK, provide clean water, recreational opportunities and support the culture, welfare and economy of local communities.

 So there is a lot at stake. This is not some interesting theoretical exercise. It is life and death for a landscape and its wildlife, and the community and culture it supports. This is the one thing that the RSPB agrees about. But apparently it sees horror where we see beauty. Their position is that these are ‘industrial landscapes’, where ‘peat is burnt to provide grouse’ and which are, perhaps most bizarre of all, ‘devoid of wildlife’.

The management of the uplands is supposedly so bad that the people responsible should be replaced, presumably by people like them, preferably actually them, who could do a better job. Obviously there would be a tiny financial problem and the new commissars would need lots of public money to turn this ‘industrial wasteland’ into paradise, but annual multi-million pound stipends from the taxpayer should cover it.

The only problem is that this plan’s outcomes are hidden in plain sight. They are not pretty. The RSPB seems reticent about its performance. It does not welcome comparisons. But as they are in a glasshouse they shouldn’t throw stones. At Lake Vrynwy, where they atypically confessed how bad things were, in an attempt to get £3,299,900 lottery money, they stated that curlew were about to become extinct, despite the ‘large numbers of curlew’ when they took over decades before.

Their ‘No Burn’ policy, the one they want to force on the uplands, has resulted in one devastating, peat-burning wildfire after another, releasing hundreds of thousands of tonnes of irreplaceable carbon into the atmosphere.

Worse still, grouse moors are financially self-sustaining. The RSPB’s management is frequently dependent on vast public handouts. The Welsh government recently gave them
£318,000 to meet ‘funding gaps’ in the management of their reserves. How can an organisation with an annual surplus of £15 million have funding gaps?

It is not easy for an enormous and rich organisation to keep a grip on reality. The risk is that the power that comes with size and wealth is so intoxicating that you believe you really do know everything, that people who persist in disagreeing with you are both wrong and bad, and that your ends justify almost any means. The RSPB is in a dangerous place. It risks being loathed by a significant and increasing sector of the rural community, people who would otherwise be its allies. There is still time for it to pull back from the brink, but there is little evidence that it has the self-awareness to bother.

RSPB