What the Curlew knows that Chair of Friends of the Dales, Jonathan Riley, doesn't

As anyone who has spent time on a managed grouse moor in the spring can attest to,the curlew's call is one of the most evocative sounds in the British uplands. A haunting, bubbling cry that has defined the moorland landscape for generations. Close your eyes on a Yorkshire moor in spring and it is possible, just briefly, to believe that little has changed. That the countryside remains as it was. That the birds are doing fine.

They are not. And that illusion, where it still exists, is maintained almost entirely by the quiet work of gamekeepers.

Jonathan Riley, chair of Friends of the Dales, claims to the love the curlew. He recently took to his social media to share an image of Yorkshire moorland and declare that he "never tires of hearing" its call. It is a sentiment with which few countryside lovers would argue. The problem is that Mr Riley has been instrumental in campaigning against the one form of land management most responsible for ensuring that call can still be heard at all.

Under his chairmanship, Friends of the Dales has been a persistent and vocal critic of driven grouse moor management. Yet it is precisely this management, and the keepers who deliver it, that conservation scientists consistently identify as the principal reason curlew populations remain viable across significant parts of upland England.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WwnnZFXkwt8

The scale of the curlew's national decline is stark. Britain holds one of the largest curlew populations in Europe, yet that population has fallen by more than half since the 1990s. The species is red-listed in the UK, regarded as a global conservation priority, and described by the RSPB's own former conservation director as "the most pressing bird conservation crisis in the UK." Curlews have been lost almost entirely from large parts of Wales, Ireland, and lowland England. Where they persist in meaningful numbers, it is rarely by accident.

On managed grouse moors, curlew productivity tells a very different story. Research by the Game & Wildlife Conservation Trust has recorded curlew nest success rates on managed moorland that are dramatically higher than on unmanaged ground. The reason is not complicated: curlews are ground-nesting birds, and ground-nesting birds are acutely vulnerable to predation. A curlew nest on unmanaged land faces foxes, stoats, carrion crows, and badgers at densities that make successful hatching a near-impossibility in many areas. The mathematics of curlew survival in the modern countryside are brutal, and without intervention, they do not add up.

Gamekeepers provide that intervention. Through year-round predator management they suppress the predator pressure that would otherwise overwhelm ground-nesting species entirely. They monitor nest sites, manage the heather structure that curlews require for both nesting and foraging, and maintain the open habitat that the species has evolved to depend upon. This is not passive stewardship. It is skilled, labour-intensive conservation work carried out by people with an intimate knowledge of the land they manage, conducted across hundreds of thousands of acres of upland England that would otherwise receive no conservation management whatsoever.

The results speak for themselves. Studies have found that curlew densities on intensively managed grouse moors can be several times higher than on comparable unmanaged ground. When keepering ceases, whether through estate sales, rewilding projects, or the kind of regulatory pressure that campaigns like those of Friends of the Dales seek to bring about, curlew numbers on that ground typically collapse within a few breeding seasons. The predators return. The nests fail. The birds move on, or they do not return at all.

This is the context in which Mr Riley's social media post must be read. He is entitled to his love of the curlew, and no one doubts its sincerity. But affection for a species and commitment to its survival are not the same thing. The curlew does not need admirers. It needs the predator-controlled, actively managed habitat that only keepered moorland currently provides at scale in upland England.

Those who campaign against grouse moor management are, whatever their intentions, campaigning against the infrastructure that keeps the curlew alive in the British uplands. If they succeed, the silence that follows will be their legacy. Mr Riley might do well to reflect on that the next time he stops to listen.