FOR many August 12th is just another summer's day. For a privileged few it is one of the most significant dates of the year. The “Glorious Twelfth” marks the start of the shooting season for red grouse (Lagopus lagopus scoticus) in Britain. Renowned as the pinnacle of game shooting thanks to its difficulty (a grouse flies at up to 80 miles per hour) and its limited availability, the sport is certainly exclusive. A day's driven grouse shooting can cost up to £3,000 per person.
It is this exclusivity that gives ammunition to those who decry the sport, believing it to be no more than rich people killing rare birds for fun. But knocking it is misguided. A closer look down the shotgun barrel reveals that grouse shooting not only provides income and employment in rural areas, but is also as much about conservation as killing.
According to the Moorland Association, a conservation group, estates in England and Wales spent £52.5m on managing 149 grouse moors for shooting in 2010; Scottish landowners manage a further 150 moors for shooting grouse. Landowners paid for predator control, heather and tree planting, heather burning to create new growth, bracken removal, pond creation and for gamekeepers—the men, and occasionally women, who do much of the hard graft.
Red grouse, a wild game bird endemic to Britain, live and breed on heather moorland. For shooting to go ahead, the density of birds must exceed 200 grouse per square kilometre. Any less, and the shotguns are put away. Significantly, grouse need to be managed: if moors become over-populated the birds may become diseased and populations can crash.
Indeed managing moorland for grouse shooting has almost certainly saved the species itself from extinction. Britain is home to 75% of the world's heather moorlands. Rarer than rainforest and under threat, these are now maintained mostly thanks to the demand for grouse shooting.
Such land management also protects the habitat of more than 46 other birds. According to a recent study by the Game and Wildlife Conservation Trust, a wildlife conservation charity, golden plovers, curlews and lapwings breed three times more successfully on managed grouse moors than on unmanaged areas. Research by the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds shows that such species are up to five times more abundant on managed moorland than elsewhere, while the decline of the black grouse, a bird on the International Union for the Conservation of Nature's “red list” of threatened species, has slowed in recent years thanks to habitat improvements.
None of this would happen without the gamekeepers. A survey, published last month, of land managed by Britain's 5,000 gamekeepers found that not only do they protect many rare species, but they also look after 1.3m hectares of land. This equates to 60% of the area covered by Britain's national parks, and exceeds the area of all the nature reserves owned by the government and conservation organisations combined.