The RSPB Finally Admits the Fuel Load Problem - then Ignores It

The RSPB's explainer of 5 August names one cause, climate change, and finds no fault in the policies it has spent a decade forcing on everybody else. Its own reserves burned this summer. The men who turned out to help are not mentioned once.

Everything in the article rests on a single sentence: that the rise in wildfire is driven by climate change "rather than the presence or absence of specific management practices such as controlled burning".

No citation is offered. Not a study, not a dataset, not an author. In a document whose entire purpose is evidential rigour, the load-bearing claim arrives as "the available evidence suggests" and is then left standing on nothing. When the evidence suits this charity we get journals and press releases. When it does not, we get a change of subject.

To prove the point, the RSPB reaches for Dava and Carrbridge in 2025, the largest wildfire this country has recorded at 12,000 hectares. The ground, we are told, was "much of which had been subject to muirburn".

Subject to muirburn when? Last spring, or in 1995? Over what share of the footprint? Carrying what fuel load on the morning it went up? None of it appears, because none of it can appear without destroying the argument.

Muirburn is a cycle, not a permanent status conferred on a hillside. Its protective effect is strictly time-limited, and ground burned three years ago carries a fraction of the fuel of ground last touched thirty years ago. Every keeper in Britain knows this.

Buried in the questions and answers is this:

"Left unchecked, more vegetation can lead to more intense fires that are harder to control."

There is the whole case, conceded in their own words. Restoration reduces grazing pressure. Reduced grazing increases vegetation. More vegetation means fiercer fires that are harder to stop. Every link in that chain is theirs.

Their answer is "targeted grazing management or cutting of vegetation". Cutting, across thousands of hectares of steep, broken, saturated ground where machinery cannot go without wrecking the very thing it is sent to save. The RSPB has spent years assuring ministers that cutting is a straight substitute for cool burning. This summer was the field trial, and the country watched the result.

By the charity's own account, fire has hit Minsmere, Dovestone and Abernethy this year, with Corrimony in 2023. These are flagship sites, held up to government for a decade as the model managed moorland should be compelled to copy. When keepered ground burns, we are told it proves the failure of management. When RSPB ground burns, we are told it proves the climate. Both cannot be true, and the charity should be made to say publicly which it will stand behind.

The unpaid fire service they cannot bring themselves to name

The article thanks fire services, partners, landowners, farmers and communities. It does not use the word gamekeeper once.

When a hill goes up, the first people on it with equipment that works are usually keepers and moorland staff, arriving with fogging units, sprayers, bowsers and beaters, and carrying the one thing no appliance brings up a moor: knowledge of the ground. Where the water is. Which tracks take a vehicle. Where the firebreaks run, because they cut those firebreaks themselves.

They do it in smoke and heat, for days, during the nesting season when they should be on their own ground, and they are paid nothing for it. The capability this charity has campaigned to regulate out of existence is the same capability that keeps arriving to save ground it has failed to protect.

And the bill goes to the people who did not cause it

The kit that fights these fires in the first critical hour is bought, maintained and replaced privately. No grant scheme delivered it. The firebreaks are cut privately, the access tracks built privately. When staff are pulled away for two days to defend somebody else's hill, their employer carries the cost. When fire crosses onto private ground, the lost heather, lost nesting habitat and years of recovery fall on the owner. There is no compensation scheme.

Private businesses carry the equipment, the labour, the damage and the recovery. The taxpayer carries the fire service. The charity carries the argument.

None of this fell from the sky. The RSPB was among the loudest voices pressing for the burning restrictions extended in 2025 on the back of a contested Natural England review. Fuel loads rose. Fire seasons lengthened. Parliament has noticed, even if the charity has not: the EFRA inquiry drew around 190 submissions, overwhelmingly from people who actually manage land.

Nobody disputes that the climate is changing. But the climate does not decide how much combustible material is standing on a hillside in August. Management does. Policy does.

So let them publish the evidence for that central claim, with citations. Let them publish the Dava burn history with dates and areas, instead of "much of which". And let them name the keepers who helped, and say plainly whether they still want that profession regulated out of existence.