Category: News

A couple of weeks ago I published a press statement from Scottish charity Trees for Life about NatureScot’s ‘mystifying lack of backbone’ in relation to a delayed licensing decision on the release of beavers in Glen Affric.

I also mentioned concerns about NatureScot’s recent decisions and behaviour in recent months relating to grouse moor licensing and the monitoring of Schedule 1 raptor species.

Criticism of NatureScot continues, this time with an opinion piece by farmer and conservationist Tom Bowser from the excellent Argaty, a rewilding estate in Doune, Perthshire, which was published in The National yesterday.

It’s reproduced below.

SOMETIMES I wonder what sort of democracy Scotland really is.

We have a government policy designed to grow our small beaver population by translocating these biodiversity-boosting animals to new parts of the country. Repeated surveys show that most Scots wish this to happen. We have the world’s most thorough official guidance, leading applicants through how to attempt such wildlife relocations.

Yet when Forestry and Land Scotland and Trees for Life followed this guidance, conducting a gold-standard two-year consultation on proposals to relocate beavers to Glen Affric, the national nature agency, NatureScot, stalled on granting a licence, citing concern among the local community.

Yet two-thirds of the Glen Affric community supported the proposals, and NatureScot itself had previously called the consultations “exemplary”. What is going on?

Since submitting their plans, the applicants have already been made to wait three long months to hear from NatureScot. Now they face a whole summer in the wilderness as the agency demands further consultation. But with community support already demonstrated after two years of engagement, what else can there possibly be to consult on?

NatureScot’s decision is stranger still given that Strathglass, where the proposal’s opponents reside, already has an established beaver population. If this application is too controversial to proceed, what hope have we of assisting the spread of beavers and allowing them to help us fight biodiversity loss and climate breakdown?

Something is very wrong at the heart of NatureScot. This is but the latest in a string of examples where it has acted against the interests of wildlife and communities.

Reaction to its controversial Glen Affric indecision has been brutal. The BBC, Herald and Scotsman wrote stories of “beaver betrayal”. Wild Justice’s Ruth Tingay detailed NatureScot’s “glaring disregard” for conservationists and “pandering” to landowners.

Springwatch presenter Iolo Williams summed the mood up: “NatureScot = not fit for purpose”.

They are right to be angry. Scotland is one of the world’s most nature-depleted countries, ranking 212th of 240 surveyed for intactness of biodiversity. Where is the leadership from those charged with restoring nature?

Let’s return to beavers. Their deadwood-filled wetlands are scientifically proven to boost biodiversity. Their dams store water in times of deluge and drought. The environmental crisis is the greatest threat humankind faces. Scotland’s nature agency ought to be encouraging the spread of beavers. Right?

Unfortunately, the opposite seems true. Every beaver translocation applicant has faced bureaucratic burdens and legislative inconsistency. I know this because I’ve been through it.

Despite having beavers living in the wild just five miles away, it took me many months to obtain a licence to translocate other families to my farm, Argaty. Time and time again I was told that our proposal to move these much-needed animals from areas where they were destined to be shot was “novel and contentious”. At that time, NatureScot was dispensing licences in less than 24 hours to farmers wishing to kill beavers.

As if stalling other applicants wasn’t bad enough, NatureScot refuses to even consider relocating beavers to any of its own, highly suitable National Nature Reserves. That it won’t jump its own bureaucratic hurdles tells you all you need to know about NatureScot and its nightmarish processes. This is not a nature agency Scots can be proud of; it is one we should be embarrassed by.

Why the lack of interest in helping Scotland’s beavers?

Part of the answer lies at the political level. By changing Inheritance Tax rules, the UK Government has alienated the farming community. Seeing the opportunity to win rural votes ahead of an election year, John Swinney seems hell-bent on throwing the farmers every bone he can. Even if that means throwing biodiversity under the bus.

We’ve seen a refusal to countenance lynx reintroduction, a commitment to maintain basic subsidy payments to farmers (paying them per farmable acre owned, rather than properly rewarding environmentally sensitive food production). The list goes on.

Is the stalling of beaver translocations another SNP gift to National Farmers’ Union lobbyists?

Much of the blame surely lies with Holyrood. NatureScot lives in fear of its SNP paymasters, who have cut the agency’s funding by 40% in the last decade. It’s a brave civil servant who defies the politicians, angers the farmers and brings further cuts.

But NatureScot is not exempt from criticism. For years they handed out beaver cull licences as though they were sweeties. The annual slaughter of one in 10 of these animals only came to an end when Trees for Life took NatureScot to judicial review and shamed it into change.

NatureScot’s cowardice over the Glen Affric beaver proposal may have triggered conservationists’ anger, but this storm has been brewing for years. NatureScot is riven with problems. Grouse shooting industry lobbyists have infiltrated its boardroom; traditional “kill everything” attitudes dominate its directorship.

There are good people within the agency, but they are too few and the enemies within are too many. As an organisation, it does not know whether it exists to stand up for nature or to simply serve the whims of its masters.

In 2021, when Trees for Life had proved the illegality of NatureScot’s beaver cull policy, celebrated Scottish writer Jim Crumley called for a “new nature-first agency”. Perhaps it’s time to make the idea a reality.

As climate breakdown and biodiversity loss ravage Scotland, we need an agency properly funded by, but independent from, government. One that is led by evidence and is willing to speak truth to power.

We need an agency willing to champion co-existence with wildlife, brave enough to overcome resistance to vital change, humane enough to support everyone through that difficult process. The only people in this agency’s boardroom and upper echelons would be those with a proven record of defending nature. This is the agency Scotland needs.

The politicians we require are those willing to make that change. If John Swinney and his heir apparent, Kate Forbes, think that the opponents of nature restoration are the only rural voters he needs to win over, he has made a grave mistake.

Tom Bowser is the owner of Argaty, a working farm based on the Braes of Doune in central Scotland, which aims to produce food in an environmentally sensitive manner and to make a home for nature. Tom is author of A Sky Full Of Kites: A Rewilding Story and the forthcoming Waters Of Life: Fighting For Scotland’s Beavers.

ENDS

Tom’s latest book is due out 1st May 2025. It is available for pre-order from the publisher here.

A couple of weeks ago conservation campaign group Wild Justice put a full page advert in Private Eye, the UK’s number one best-selling news and current affairs magazine, to draw readers’ attention to the absurd release of over 50 million non-native pheasants into the countryside every year, for shooting.

It was the first of three planned adverts and this one caused quite a reaction, with many people commenting how surprised they were to learn that pheasants were non-native to the UK, let alone that 50 million of them are released into the countryside every year for so-called ‘sport shooting’. The advert also prompted conversations in Whitehall, according to sources.

The gamebird shooting industry wasn’t impressed with this level of awareness-raising amongst the general public and politicians – no surprise really given that they’ve been hoodwinking everyone for decades about how ‘sustainable’ gamebird-shooting is supposed to be.

Imagine Wild Justice’s surprise then when Private Eye got in touch to say it was pulling the other two adverts and didn’t provide any explanation for that decision. You can draw your own conclusions.

Amusingly, since Wild Justice announced the news this morning, Private Eye’s censorship has caused somewhat of a Streisand Effect and many people are now asking to see the other two adverts that Private Eye has refused to publish.

Wild Justice has placed the two remaining ads with another publication and they should be out in the next few weeks. It’s probably best not to name the publication in advance to avoid the possibility of it being nobbled!

For those who wish to support Wild Justice you can sign up for their free newsletter here.

For those who want to see a ban on driven grouse shooting, (not the same as pheasant shooting but just as absurd, for different reasons, and just as mired in wildlife crime) you can sign the Wild Justice petition here (it currently stands at 84,000 signatures and needs 100,00- signatures to trigger a Westminster debate). The petition closes on 22 May 2025.

It would be deliciously sweet if the petition attracted more support as a result of Wild Justice being censored!

UPDATE 27 April 2025: Private Eye ‘explains’ (sort of) its reasons for pulling Wild Justice adverts (here)

Scottish charity Trees for Life has issued a damning press release about “NatureScot’s mystifying lack of backbone” in relation to a delayed licensing decision on the release of beavers in Glen Affric.

I’ll come to that press release in a second, but it reflects a wider and growing anger amongst conservationists towards NatureScot, and particularly its Wildlife Management department, for some utterly stupid and ill-thought out decisions made in recent months relating to grouse moor licensing and the monitoring of Schedule 1 raptor species.

It’s not just the decisions that have been made, but it’s more about how they were made, with appalling levels of communication, shrouded in secrecy and in some cases, blatant lies have been told. There has been a glaring display of disregard for the views of those in the conservation sector and an overt demonstration of pandering to the demands of landowners, particularly those who own game-shooting estates.

We saw an example of that last autumn/winter when NatureScot made amendments to the grouse moor licences after coming under pressure from the grouse shooting industry. NatureScot didn’t consult with any other stakeholders and instead held secret talks and meetings that resulted in a significantly weakened licence and a massive, gaping loophole that makes enforcement measures for raptor persecution (and other wildlife) crimes on grouse moors pretty much unenforceable (see here). The Scottish Government has acknowledged there are issues and efforts to rectify that mess are ongoing.

There’s also been another NatureScot fiasco running in the background over the last five months relating to licences issued to raptor fieldworkers to monitor Schedule 1 species. I won’t write about that here because it deserves a separate blog or two, which I’ll write soon, but be under no illusion about the levels of anger from a number of conservation organisations about how NatureScot has behaved during the process. There will undoubtedly be repercussions.

And now there’s the beaver licensing fiasco at Glen Affric, with NatureScot being accused by conservationists of “great beaver betrayal” and concerns that some within NatureScot have “succumbed to pressure from outside forces“.

NatureScot’s reputation reached rock bottom in 2018 when it issued a licence to a bunch of predator-hating landowners and gamekeepers to kill ravens in Strathbraan in a five-year experiment, “just to see what happens” (here). That licence was pulled after a successful legal challenge from the Scottish Raptor Study Group resulted in NatureScot’s own scientific advisory committee stating that the scientific rigour of the licence was “completely inadequate” (here).

Since then, relationships between conservationists and NatureScot had improved significantly in recent years, with efforts made by both parties to rebuild trust. It was going well, up until last summer, when it became apparent that someone at NatureScot, or perhaps a couple of them, were clearly making decisions without the ‘openness and transparency” that NatureScot laughingly claims to uphold.

Expect to read more about the fall out, and ramifications, in coming weeks.

Meanwhile, here’s the press release from Trees for Life, issued yesterday:

NATURESCOT ACCUSED OF ‘GREAT BEAVER BETRAYAL’

‘Mystifying’ decision by Scotland’s nature agency comes despite huge public support for return of native species and ‘exemplary’ local consultations

Scottish government agency NatureScot has unexpectedly delayed its decision to grant a licence application for the historic official release of beavers in Glen Affric citing ‘concern among the local community and its representatives’ as a reason for its controversial delay. 

Another government agency, Forestry and Land Scotland, submitted a licence application in December, following two years and three phases of extensive local consultation which resulted in two thirds of people involved supporting the release of beavers in the glen. 

Steve Micklewright, CEO of Trees for Life said, “This is an astonishing move by NatureScot. After two years of exhaustive consultations that far exceeded the requirements set out by NatureScot and that they have described as exemplary, one has to ask, what more is there to consult on?”

Beavers create wetlands that benefit other wildlife, soak up carbon dioxide, purify water and reduce flooding. They can also bring economic benefits to communities through eco-tourism. 

“NatureScot’s mystifying lack of backbone in the face of the nature and climate emergencies betrays so many people in the community who have engaged with this process in good faith and want the hope and renewal beavers would bring,” said Steve Micklewright.

“The agency’s indecision also flies in the face of a Scottish Government directive to its public agencies to return beavers to suitable new areas of the country, and polls showing three-quarters of Scots want to see public bodies delivering on that. Scotland can’t afford its national nature agency to be failing to deliver on its remit on biodiversity in this way. NatureScot needs to be worthy of its name.

“Very senior NatureScot managers were endorsing our gold standard approach to public consultation even after the licence application was submitted, so the fear is agency bosses have succumbed to pressure from outside forces. NatureScot should do the right thing and provide full, transparent answers to explain its inconsistent behaviour.”

ENDS

Notes to Editors

In a recent opinion poll conducted for the Scottish Rewilding Alliance, 73% of respondents said Scotland’s public bodies should identify more sites on their land for beavers.

Scotland’s Beaver Strategy, published by NatureScot in 2022, aims to ensure communities are supported to maximise the benefits of beavers, with negative impacts minimised, and to actively expand the beaver population into appropriate areas.

Trees for Life and FLS have been working in partnership for over two years on the Glen Affric proposal, which would have been the first official release of beavers to the northwest Highlands, four centuries since the native species was driven to extinction.

The rigorous consultations have significantly exceeded the requirements of Scotland’s National Beaver Strategy. This includes three rounds of extensive public engagement, resulting in two-thirds (67%) community support as long as conditions are met, and Trees for Life’s appointment of a dedicated Beaver Management Officer from the local area.

UPDATE 14 April 2025: “Something is very wrong at the heart of NatureScot” – opinion piece by farmer & conservationist Tom Bowser (here)

This morning DEFRA has announced a series of proposed new (and long-overdue) measures to further limit burning on peatland in England which, if implemented, will not be welcomed by those who own and mismanage moorland for driven grouse shooting.

The proposed new measures include significantly increasing the area where the current burning ban is in place, changing the existing definition of ‘deep peat’ from anything over 40cm to anything over 30cm, and revising the existing licensing system to only permit prescribed burning in limited circumstances where there is a strict need (e.g. reducing wildfire risk) and only where the applicant can demonstrate that other methods (e.g. cutting) would not work. The applicant must also ‘show how they intend to move the land away from the need to burn in future in order to receive a licence‘.

DEFRA has also announced that, ‘The England Peat Map, a detailed, open-access map of England’s peatlands, covering extent, depth, and condition, is being developed by Natural England and will be published later in the spring‘. 

Many of these proposed changes to The Heather and Grass etc Burning (England) Regulations 2021 were argued for in a legal challenge by Wild Justice in 2021 (see here). The courts did not give permission for the legal challenge to proceed and even refused an appeal against that decision (see here) and yet here we are, four years later, with DEFRA (albeit under a new Government) proposing to introduce some of those very same measures that Wild Justice was calling for! It’s another good example of how campaigners don’t need to win court cases to influence Government policy.

On the face of it, the new proposed measures look like a vast improvement on the Government’s previous regulations in 2021, which were quite rightly criticised by many in the conservation sector for being too weak (e.g. see here), but as ever, the devil will be in the detail.

There is still a strong argument, for example, that ‘peatland’ shouldn’t be defined by peat depth (e.g. see this excellent guest blog from last year in connection with the Wildlife Management & Muirburn (Scotland) Bill).

Then there’s the more obvious argument that a ban on driven grouse shooting would not just stop grouse moors being set alight every year for the sole purpose of artificially increasing the number of red grouse available to be shot, but it would also be good news for all the hen harriers, peregrines, red kites, buzzards, ravens etc etc that are illegally killed on those moors. If you haven’t yet signed Wild Justice’s petition calling for a ban on this so-called ‘sport’ please do so here.

DEFRA has launched an eight-week consultation on the proposed new burning restrictions which will run until 25 May 2025 (see here). As the announcement was only made this morning it’ll take some time to scrutinise the documents but I expect some in the conservation sector will, in due course, provide helpful summaries and guidance for those who wish to participate. I don’t doubt that the grouse shooting industry will be rallying its troops to argue against the new measures.

Here is a copy of DEFRA’s press release from this morning:

NEW PROPOSALS TO BAN HEATHER BURNING ON PEATLAND TO PROTECT AIR, WATER AND WILDLIFE

Extension to ban of burning on deep peat proposed by Government, so that an extra 146,000 hectares are protected.

• Peatlands store carbon, improve water quality, provide valuable habitat for wildlife, and help protect communities from flooding
• Action will improve air quality in villages, towns and cities, help deliver manifesto commitments to reach Net Zero by 2050 and expand wildlife-rich habitat, as part of our Plan for Change

Nature-rich peatland habitats are to be better protected under plans set out by the Government today (Monday 31 March), which would ban burning on peat in the uplands, improving health and wellbeing of people in nearby communities.

Sometimes described as the country’s lungs, peatlands are a vital resource which can store carbon, reduce flood risk, improve water quality, and support rare wildlife such as the golden plover and curlews. They are also some of our richest habitats for dragonflies with 25 of the UK’s 38 species found on upland peatbogs.

However, 80% of England’s peatlands are currently degraded. Burning on peatland increases heather growth, which dries out the peatland, causing it to actually emit rather than store carbon.

Burning of vegetation including heather on this scale causes the release of harmful smoke into the air, impacting air quality across communities. This includes harmful air pollutants for human health, including ones strongly associated with strokes, cardiovascular disease, asthma and some lung cancers.

Nature Minister Mary Creagh said:

Our peatlands are this country’s Amazon Rainforest – home to our most precious wildlife, storing carbon and reducing flooding risk.

The UK has 13% of the world’s blanket bog. A rare global habitat, it is a precious part of our national heritage, and that is why we‘re announcing a consultation on these measures to ensure deep peat is better protected.

These changes will benefit communities by improving air and water quality, and protect homes and businesses from flood damage, which supports economic stability and security under our Plan for Change. 

If implemented, these changes will increase the area currently protected from 222,000 to more than 368,000 hectares of England’s total 677,250 hectares of deep peat, meaning an area equivalent to the size of Greater London, Greater Manchester and West Midlands put together will now be better protected.

The definition of deep peat will be revised, so that deep peat is counted as anything over 30cms rather than 40cms. The entire area of upland deep peat that is potentially subject to burning will be protected.

This approach is being supported by evidence provided by Natural England. Any prescribed burning would need to be done under strict licence, issued where there is a clear need, for example to reduce wildfire risk.  

The consultation will run for eight weeks from today and the public and land managers are urged to have their say. The Government is proposing to refine the existing licencing system whereby applicants need to successfully explain why alternative methods have not or would not work and show how they intend to move the land away from the need to burn in future in order to receive a licence. One of the grounds to apply for a licence to burn will be to reduce the risk of wildfire, so we can balance environmental protection with practical land management. 

The supporting evidence has also been published today. Natural England published a comprehensive updated Evidence Review on ‘The effects of managed burning on upland peatland biodiversity, carbon and water’, along with a Definition of Favourable Conservation Status for Blanket bog, which sets out its view on favourable conservation status for Blanket bog in England.
The England Peat Map, a detailed, open-access map of England’s peatlands, covering extent, depth, and condition, is being developed by Natural England and will be published later in the spring. 

ENDS

UPDATE 8 September 2025: Comprehensive evidence review on effects of grouse moor burning on biodiversity, carbon & water – a report the shooting industry doesn’t seem keen to promote (here)