Living Uplands


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Black Grouse restoration and conservation.

25th Mar 2024

Living Uplands has a particular focus on collating data in the Uplands. Collecting data over time provides an ability to consider what might be impacting across the landscape by reviewing trends and changes within the information collated.

Having reliable data helps improve management decisions, as much about doing nothing as it might be doing something as a best option to support to sustainably and biodiversity across the landscape.

Since 1987 data has been collected on an area of upper Weardale on the numbers of Black Grouse across a number of locations not far from each other.

Caption: Our project was inspired by the Black Grouse, a red listed British bird - our emblem.

Only the Black Grouse were counted, being loud and very visible at an early morning lek. The Grey Hens, are there to be impressed but more discrete, meaning fewer would be counted.

CAPTION: Black Grouse make themselves seen and heard, while the female grey hen is more discrete.

The health of a lek is a clear indicator of the overall Black Grouse population in each area.

What a long-term collation of data enables, albeit with some absences or wider intervals between counts, is to see the story in numbers and to evaluate over this time the environment, management interventions and weather events to better understand what works, what doesn't work and when more or less intervention might be required.

Note: In both charts the vertical axis is the cumulative total of Black Grouse counted across all Leks. The count on Area C was intermittent until recent years.

In early years there was mixed news. The traditional lek was still there, but numbers were variable and there was no growth.

The first ten years of monitoring were not encouraging. In 1998 things changed with a new conservation focused owner taking a fresh look at the landscape. A holistic review the introduction of a new management plan, based on countryside stewardship, to restore habitat and use the metric based on the health of the Black Grouse population to consider the success of the plan.

The improvement plan introduced addressed historic over-grazing, removal of heavy grass cover, sowing moorland seeds including heather which is an essential food for Black Grouse, and planting edging shrub. Over time this was a successful strategy with a steady increase in the number of birds.

Extremely harsh winters 2008-2010 saw numbers fall back precipitously. They recovered, and it was noticed that nearby Black Grouse had started to lek in significant numbers. This second Lek became the centre of activity and numbers have been quite consistent over the past decade or so.

In more recent years there was clearly a reduction in Black Grouse at the oldest Lek for which we have records, returning to numbers as far back as 1987. Because the data was being collated and shared, the landowner was able to identify that change and start to evaluate why that might be happening.

More recently, it seems that the numbers on the older lek (Area A) have declined a little. There is no obvious reason why that would be the case but having the data available means the area will be monitored to evaluate whether intervention might be needed, or not.

The data on bird populations is invaluable. This programme of counting Black Grouse provides an enviable record of success and a metric on which to evaluate the health of the moor for ground nesting birds generally.

Living Uplands is a strong advocate of data collation as the foundation of better understanding, and better science, of our living environment. Alongside the Black Grouse count, an annual broader bird count in association with the Young Volunteers at Durham Wildlife Trust, and elsewhere by the British Trust for Ornithology, shows how it is possible to manage landscape effectively to offer the much-endangered British wildlife the best chance of sustainability.