Two Major Wildfires Roaring. One Landowner, the RSPB. It is No Coincidence.

As firefighters spend another night on the hill at Ryvoan Bothy, as families are turned out of their homes in Glenmore with minutes to grab their belongings, as three and a half kilometres of the Cairngorms goes up in smoke, the two largest wildfires burning in Britain right now are on RSPB ground. Not grouse moors. Not the land that the RSPB has spent a decade telling the public is badly managed. Its own.

That is not bad luck. That is not the weather. That is a direct and entirely foreseeable consequence of a management ideology that the RSPB has pushed, funded, lobbied for and lectured the rest of us about, and which is now setting fire to the very species it claims to protect.

Duncan Ferguson, evacuated from his home in Glenmore, said something this week that should end careers. Five years ago, residents asked for a fire plan. They asked because they knew, with absolute certainty, that this was coming. Nothing happened.

Five years. Five years of warnings from the people who actually live there, ignored by an organisation with an income in the hundreds of millions and a communications department larger than most fire services.

Then, when the inevitable arrived, the RSPB reached for a helicopter and discovered there wasn't one, because every aircraft in the country was already fighting fires elsewhere. It had to be rescued by its neighbours. Wildland Ltd and Rothiemurchus turned up with fogging units on quad bikes and water pumps, because the practical people of the countryside always do, even for those who spend the rest of the year briefing against them.

And they were not alone. Teams of gamekeepers have driven in from all over Scotland and worked through Saturday night and Sunday night alongside the Fire Service as three separate wildfires raged within a ten to twenty mile radius north of Grantown-on-Spey. They were not on the payroll. They were not on a rota. They turned up with their own kit because that is what they do, and because they knew that if they had not, the two main fires would have joined.

Read that again. Firefighters on the ground said a combined blaze would have been on a scale never seen before and would have completely overwhelmed the emergency effort. It was stopped by a round-the-clock effort from gamekeepers and land managers working in tandem with Scottish Fire and Rescue, holding a fire in the Lochindorb area before the wind turned. And it remains a possibility, with flames having crossed the Ferness road into a large regeneration block. A regeneration block. Of course.

There is no scientific puzzle here and the RSPB knows it. Fire needs fuel. Leave heather and moor grass to grow rank and dry for years and you build a bomb. Light it, and no amount of policy documents will put it out.

Controlled burning removes that fuel in small patches, in cold damp conditions, under strict law, by people whose families have done it for generations. It creates firebreaks. It creates a mosaic where fire has somewhere to die. It is the single most effective wildfire prevention tool this country has, and the RSPB has campaigned relentlessly to take it away.

Well, here is what that campaign looks like on the ground. Look at the photographs. Look at the smoke over Abernethy.

While all of this burns, NatureScot is finalising legislation that will make it much harder for gamekeepers, farmers and crofters to carry out controlled muirburn. The one intervention proven to stop the build-up of combustible fuel across the landscape. They are preparing to restrict it while, as the Scottish Gamekeepers Association puts it, huge fuel loads are allowed to build up across the country in planting schemes and rewilding areas.

"We have warned about this constantly and, exactly what we said would happen, is happening."

There is no clearer sentence in British land management this decade. The SGA has now asked the Scottish Government and its nature advisers to come out and look while the fires are still burning, before the lessons disappear into six months of consultation fog. Come to the hill. Bring the draft bill. Read it there.

Same heatwave. Same very high risk warning. Same careless barbecues, same discarded cigarettes, same drought. Managed grouse moors across the north of England and Scotland are sitting in identical conditions right now and they are not the ones making the front pages. They are not the ones being evacuated. In many cases their keepers are out fighting somebody else's fire, unpaid, with their own kit, at their own risk.

If controlled burning were the menace the RSPB claims, the moors would be infernos and the RSPB reserves would be green. Look out of the window. The opposite is true, it is true every single summer, and everyone in this debate knows it.

The SGA has put it in terms no one in government can pretend not to understand. If you control the fuel, it gives those fighting the fire a chance to catch it. Without that, firefighters get so stretched dealing with wildfire that they do not have the resources to attend other fires.

Other fires. Houses. Cars. People. Crews from Aberdeen relieved by staff from Forfar, with Perthshire crews also in attendance, all of them hauled across Scotland because a policy decision was made that fuel loads do not matter. The RSPB could not get a helicopter this week because every aircraft in Britain was already committed elsewhere. That is what a stretched service looks like from the inside.

The Fire Service, as the SGA is careful to say, has been brilliant. So have the Police. The team working between crews and keepers, with back-burning permitted to prevent flare-ups, has been exactly what it should be. But the Fire Service cannot be everywhere, and the people writing the legislation appear not to have noticed.

Capercaillie nest on the ground. They were recorded at Ryvoan in May. The Scottish government has just launched an emergency plan to save a bird that may now have been cooked alive in a fire on the reserve of the charity that fundraises off its face.

Peat that took thousands of years to lay down can be destroyed in an afternoon, dumping carbon into the atmosphere at a scale that makes the RSPB's climate posturing look like a joke. Homes evacuated. Businesses shut in the middle of their season. Firefighters put in danger for night after night because an organisation that will not manage fuel decided that ideology mattered more than the people who live there.

None of that cost lands on the RSPB. It lands on the fire service, the taxpayer, the neighbours, the wildlife and the village of Glenmore.

The Cairngorms National Park Authority calls the fire deeply concerning. It is. But let us be precise about the concern. Weather does not create fuel loads. Management does, or refuses to. Every year the climate makes the case for reducing fuel on our uplands stronger, and every year the RSPB argues harder in the opposite direction, with a straight face, while its own land burns.

The EFRA Committee has been taking evidence on wildfire. The evidence is currently visible from twenty miles away.

And the final word belongs not to us but to the association representing the people who spent the weekend on a burning hill keeping two catastrophes from becoming one: "At the moment, with the policies we have in Scotland, we are not protecting anything."

We wish the crews at Ryvoan every success. We wish the people of Glenmore a quick return home. And we say this plainly: an organisation that has spent years demonising the only proven fuel management tool we have, that ignored its neighbours for five years, that could not find a helicopter and had to be bailed out by the estates and keepers it disparages, has forfeited any right to lecture anyone about how to look after the British uplands.

The RSPB owes the Cairngorms an explanation. It owes Glenmore an apology. And it owes the rest of the country an honest admission that it got this catastrophically, and now visibly, wrong.