The RSPB wants to judge how moors are managed. It should start with its own.

This summer, two wildfires on the RSPB’s Dove Stone reserve destroyed between 800 and 1,000 hectares of habitat, by the charity’s own estimate. Abernethy and Minsmere burned too. These came after fires on RSPB land at Forsinard Flows in 2019 and Corrimony in 2023.

The same organisation planned to arrive at this week’s UK Wildfire Conference in Leeds with a poster telling fire services, researchers and policymakers that “prescribed burning increases wildfire severity in UK upland moorland.”

That is quite a message from a landowner whose own reserves have just been through one of the worst fire seasons in memory. It also fell apart the moment anyone asked to see the evidence behind it.

The Moorland Association wrote to the RSPB on 26 October asking for the data, the methods, and whether the work had been peer reviewed. Three days later the title had changed. The poster is now “A comparison of wildfire severity on grouse-moor and non-grouse-moor upland moorland.”

The claim that burning makes wildfires worse has disappeared, and the RSPB says the change simply reflects how its research has developed. The two titles say very different things. The first stated a cause. The second describes a comparison, and a comparison of grouse moors with “everything else” cannot tell you why one burned more fiercely than another. Moors differ in vegetation, peat depth, altitude, weather, access and history. Unless all of that is accounted for, any difference in fire severity could have any number of causes. Nor does “non-grouse-moor” describe RSPB reserves or any single alternative way of managing land. It is a catch-all category, not a model to follow.

The research itself is still unpublished. The RSPB declined to share the detail before the conference. Yet it was ready to put a cause-and-effect headline in front of the people who shape wildfire policy. That is campaigning, not cautious science, and it fits the RSPB’s long campaign to end burning on peatland a little too neatly.

This matters because headlines like that one end up in regulation. The rules on burning have already been tightened twice, in 2021 and again in 2025. Every new restriction leans on claims that burning does more harm than good. If the evidence for those claims turns out to be a comparison dressed up as a conclusion, the people who manage the land and the wildlife that depends on it are the ones who pay.

Prescribed burning is a tool for reducing the fuel that turns a spark into a disaster. It should be scrutinised, and those who use it accept that. The alternatives the RSPB favours deserve the same scrutiny, and the RSPB’s own reserves are where that test is already happening.

So far, the charity has offered early observations that some restored areas at Dove Stone escaped the worst damage. It has said much less about the areas that didn’t, about what it learned from Forsinard and Corrimony, or about what will change before the 2027 season.

A wildfire does not prove a reserve was badly managed. But an organisation that wants to set the rules for everyone else’s land cannot expect its own record to go unexamined.

The RSPB has dropped its headline. The next step is to publish the evidence in full and give the same account of its own reserves that it demands of every grouse moor. Until it does, no minister or regulator should treat this research as grounds for restricting burning any further.

If you believe moorland policy should follow the evidence, not the headlines, sign the petition to revoke the 2021 and 2025 heather burning regulations: https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/783877