Following last week’s endorsement of controlled burning to protect heather moorland in the New Forest, the BBC’s Countryfile has once again unwittingly backed another time-honoured conservation technique practiced on grouse moors: targeted predator control.
Sunday’s episode centred on Welney Wetland Centre in the Norfolk Fens, which is managed by the Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust. The site’s Lady Fen wetland is home to many rare species of breeding waders and overwintering wild fowl.

As presenter Matt Baker explains, “Predators can greatly affect breeding bird populations by disturbing nests and eggs and by attacking chicks, leading to a dramatic decline in their numbers.”
Sam Instone, Assistant Warden at WWT Welney, then attends to the electric fence, which runs at 5,900V and is used to keep predators such as foxes, badgers, and stoats away from the waders.
“What we’re trying to protect is most of our wading birds so these could be lapwings, avocet, redshank, black-tailed godwits,” Instone explains. Black tailed godwits are on the UK’s red list of endangered species, with fewer than 50 breeding pairs left in the country.
“I like to always root for the little guys, especially our invertebrates and our birds because they’re a huge part of our ecosystem. Not only they are great indicators for climate change, it’s also playing out in the food chain as well because without your small guys you wouldn’t have your nice fluffy big guys like the seals," Instone adds.
The tragedy is that the government and Natural England, under pressure from groups like the RSPB, have made it progressively harder for land managers to practice effective predator control. Licenses for managing predatory birds such as gulls and corvids are practically impossible to secure, while groups like Protect the Wild and the League Against Cruel Sports (both of whom are regularly consulted by government on conservation matters) advocate to ban the use of snares for foxes.

The results speak for themselves. While electric fences can be a good start for predator control, they require regular maintenance and are frequently bypassed by more cunning mammals. In May 2024, the avocet colony at RSPB Burton Mere was all but wiped out by badgers that managed to sneak past the site’s new electric fencing. The RSPB admitted that this was the third time badgers had dealt such considerable damage to Burton Mere’s wader populations.
Sunday’s Countryfile hinted at this issue, with Instone observing that the fence around Lady Fen requires constant maintenance to repair damage inflicted by local deer.
“Deers can sometimes jump across [the electric fence]. Their back legs will sometimes kick off the insulators, which can short-circuit the fence,” she explained.
As with controlled burning to protect heather, professional conservationists are well attuned to the effectiveness of traditional land management techniques in preserving rare habitats and bird species. These practices are routinely carried out by gamekeepers on shooting estates but branded as “barbaric” by campaigning charities that cannot bear to admit the exemplary conservation records of these estates. So they make a rod for their own – and everyone else's - backs, ensuring that vital conservation work like snaring and corvid control become harder with each passing year.