Tag: Cairngorms National Park

A large pit containing dead Pheasants, Red-legged Partridges, Wood Pigeons, deer parts, and a lot of rubbish, including a burnt mattress, has been found on a shooting estate in the Cairngorms National Park.

Last October, a blog reader was walking on the Glenbanchor and Pitmain Estate, to the north of Kingussie when they saw what they described as “an estate vehicle” tipping dead birds in to an area at the side of a track that was concealed behind a spoil heap.

The walker returned to the site once the vehicle had left and took these photographs:

It appears that at least some of the gamebirds have been ‘breasted out’ – their breast meat removed, presumably for sale/consumption, and the carcasses then dumped in the pit.

Regular blog readers will know that the dumping of shot gamebirds is a common and widespread illegal practice that has been going on for years, despite the repeated denials by the shooting industry. Often they’re fly-tipped by the side of the road (e.g. see here).

In this case, the pile of rubble on site suggests that this is a burial pit, and perhaps the burnt mattress is used to cover the pit temporarily, in between dumping visits.

The blog reader reported this incident to SEPA (Scottish Environment Protection Agency) to see whether an offence had been committed but SEPA apparently thought ‘they’re subject to a waste disposal exemption’ and therefore this doesn’t constitute a crime.

It’s hard to believe that dumping gamebirds for burial is legal, especially when the country is in the grip of Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza, but the regulations are very confusing.

I’ve done a bit of research on this but I’m still not sure which regulations apply and which don’t.

If the gamebird carcasses are classed as animal by-products (and there are questions around that – it’s complicated!) then disposing of them by burial is unlawful due to the risk of spreading disease through residues in the soil, groundwater or air pollution (Animal By-Products (Enforcement) (Scotland) Regulations 2013).

There are exemptions, in areas of Scotland classed as ‘remote areas’. However, the location of this particular pit lies outside the ‘remote area’ and so an exemption wouldn’t apply:

I need to do some more work on this, and talk to the local authority (Highland Council) who I believe would be responsible for enforcement of any breaches of the Animal By-Products legislation.

But whether this is legal or illegal, it’s ethically appalling.

And I dare say the Cairngorms National Park Authority will be taking note, given its stated intention to:

‘Ensure that all pheasant and partridge shoots adhere to best practice and that all gamebird releases are sustainable and do not negatively impact on native biodiversity‘

and

‘Depending on the evidence gathered, investigate the use of Park Authority powers to regulate gamebird releases and develop a regulatory approach if required‘ (see here).

For the benefit of the Cairngorms National Park Authority, and anyone else who wants to take a look, here are the location details of the pit (estate boundary sourced from Andy Wightman’s Who Owns Scotland website):

It’s my understanding that NatureScot is currently considering whether police evidence about an unrelated alleged wildlife crime on this estate is sufficient to impose a three-year General Licence restriction (see here).

You may also not be surprised to hear that this isn’t the only gamebird-dumping pit that’s been found on a sporting estate in Scotland….details to follow.

UPDATE 8 April 2026: General & hazardous waste, including bags of suspected shot gamebirds, found dumped in a pit on an estate in Scotland (here)

In spring 2025, news emerged that the GWCT (Game & Wildlife Conservation Trust) was going to be conducting a pilot study to look at the number of non-native gamebirds (Pheasants & Red-legged Partridges) being released into the Cairngorms National Park (see here).

This research represents the first step of a commitment made by the Cairngorms National Park Authority in its 2022-2027 Partnership Plan to assess the impact of these non-native species on habitats and native wildlife (see here for an hilarious video of a 2021 Park Board meeting where certain members tried to block the idea).

Here’s the relevant information page from the CNP’s current Partnership Plan:

The GWCT’s report was published in August 2025 but to be perfectly honest, it’s somewhat underwhelming (report available for downloading at foot of this blog).

The most significant limitation, in my view, is that the report only includes data from ten of at least 22 sporting estates known to be rearing and releasing gamebirds for shooting within the Park’s boundary. That’s only 45%, not even half of the estates involved in gamebird releases, and there is no indication of how representative those ten estates are.

That’s not a criticism of the study’s authors – they are upfront about this significant constraint and they had tried to include information from the 22 estates that they had been told were rearing and releasing gamebirds within the Park, but three shoots were in the process of changing management so were unable to answer questions, two shoots were ‘too busy’ at the time the interviews were scheduled, and seven shoots refused to participate.

I do have a criticism of the study design. To identify the estates rearing and releasing gamebirds in the CNP, the authors used their existing contacts as well as a ‘snowball sampling’ strategy, where participants suggest other potential participants. However, since 2006 it has been compulsory to register with the Animal Plant & Health Agency’s (APHA) Poultry Register when more than 50 gamebirds are released. It is entirely feasible to submit FoIs to APHA to access those data based on postcodes or council areas, just as Guy Shrubsole did in England. I wonder why the GWCT didn’t use this approach? Perhaps they suspected that compliance with the Register might be low and they didn’t want to draw attention to it?

Going forward, as more work is most definitely needed, researchers can access the Government’s Scottish Kept Bird Register, which replaced the Poulty Register in Scotland in 2024 and also requires mandatory reporting. There’s no reason that staff at the Cairngorms National Park Authority, or indeed anybody reading this blog, couldn’t request data covering the National Park.

Due to the limited number of estates available/willing to participate in the study, the authors relied on data from the National Gamebag Census (a voluntary reporting scheme used by some shoots to record the number of birds killed during a shoot season) to compare the number of gamebirds they’d been told were being released on ten shoots in the CNP with release densities in the wider Scottish countryside and also in England.

One of the study’s headline claims was that across ‘all’ shoots in the CNP (meaning just the ten participating estates), the total number of birds released in seasons 2022/3, 2023/4 and 2024/5 were 50,900, 61,200 and 49,800 Pheasants and 8,000, 36,000 and 29,240 Red-legged Partridges. The report states that the release densities “are lower than those reported from Scotland as a whole“.

The problem with this headline claim is that the results will be, and have already been, either genuinely misunderstood or deliberately misrepresented, without reference to the pretty big constraints in data sampling as discussed above.

I heard an MSP reference this report several times during a Parliamentary debate earlier this week (more on that shortly because it was really interesting) and it was inferred that the report’s findings related to gamebird releases in the whole of the Cairngorms National Park, not just the small number of estates that actually participated in the study, representing less than half of the known shoots and whose representative value is unknown.

I would like to see the briefing notes given to that MSP by the gamebird shooting industry to see whether they have deliberately misrepresented the study’s findings or whether the MSP has just genuinely failed to grasp the details. I will return to this topic.

Of wider importance, the question now is, what will the Cairngorms National Park Authority do with the findings of this report it commissioned?

One of the ‘Actions by 2027’ outlined in the Park’s 2022-2027 Partnership Plan is to ‘Establish a baseline for the number of gamebirds released in the National Park and assess their impact on native biodiversity‘.

Given that it’s now the end of 2025 and it’s still not known how many non-native gamebirds are released within the National Park boundary, let alone what their impact may be on native species, I’d say meeting this deadline looks unlikely.

You can read /download the GWCT report here: