Selective Sympathy: Our Two-Tier Approach to Wildlife Disturbance

In the space of a fortnight, stories about disturbance to waterfowl have drawn national attention.

A cygnet was struck and killed by rowers at Cookham. Two more cygnets died during the Reading Amateur Regatta, a fixture that has run since 1842.

And on Hampstead Heath, crowds of bathers were filmed wading into a non-swimming pond where swans had nested successfully for the first time in years, prompting an alderman of the City of London to call the behaviour "utterly appalling" and to warn of fines and arrests.

The death of these birds through carelessness is of course a loss, but where is the equivalent outrage for the red-listed birds that are disturbed, trampled and killed on Britain's uplands every single day of the breeding season, almost entirely without comment?

Across the moors and rough grazing of the uplands, curlew, golden plover, lapwing, dunlin and other ground-nesting waders are sitting on nests right now. Many of them are red-listed. The curlew, our largest wading bird, is one of the most pressing conservation priorities in the country, and the uplands hold a significant share of what remains of its breeding population.

These birds do not nest in trees or on islands in the middle of a river. They nest on the ground, in the open, exquisitely camouflaged and almost impossible to see until you are on top of them. A walker straying off the path, a dog let off the lead to range across the heather, a camper pitching a tent on open access land, a disposable barbecue left to smoulder, all of these cause real harm. A flushed adult abandons the nest and exposes the eggs to cold and to predators. A trampled clutch is simply gone. A wildfire started by carelessness can wipe out an entire season's breeding across hundreds of hectares in an afternoon.

None of this makes the national news. There is no viral footage, no statement from a City alderman, no police appeal for witnesses. The birds die quietly, and the breeding season fails quietly, and the public moves on.

Consider how neatly the Hampstead Heath story maps onto what gamekeepers and moorland managers see every week. People ignoring signs. People bringing dogs into places dogs are banned. Large numbers of visitors treating a fragile habitat as a leisure amenity and disturbing nesting birds in the process. On the Heath, this was reported as a scandal, and rightly taken seriously by the authorities.

On the moor, the identical behaviour is too often defended as a right. Suggest that a dog should be on a lead through the nesting season, or that open access does not mean access to a curlew's nest, and you will be told that the countryside belongs to everyone and that those who manage it are killjoys. The disturbance is the same. The harm to red-listed birds is, if anything, far greater. Only the public verdict changes.

We are not asking for less sympathy for the swans. We are asking for a fraction of that attention to be directed at the birds that need it most, and for the same standard to be applied consistently.

Most people who walk the uplands have no wish to harm anything. They simply do not know that the patch of moorland they are crossing is full of nests, that their dog ranging through the heather is a lethal threat, that a barbecue on a dry spring day can become a wildfire. The Countryside Code exists precisely to bridge that gap, and yet it remains barely promoted, rarely enforced, and widely treated as optional.

If a paddling pool on Hampstead Heath can command headlines and the threat of arrest, then the systematic, season-long disturbance of red-listed waders across the uplands deserves at least a serious public education effort. Clear signage during the nesting season. Genuine promotion of the Countryside Code. Honest information about dogs, fire and disturbance. And a recognition that the people who manage these landscapes, far from being the enemy of wildlife, are the ones quietly holding the line for the birds that no camera is pointed at.

The cygnets at Cookham and Reading mattered. So do the curlew chicks that will not hatch this year because someone let their dog off the lead. It is time we behaved as though both were true.