RSPB uplands officer, Pat Thompson, seems to delight in courting controversy with statements that many feel clearly incite hostility towards moorland communities.
In 2017 Thompson was ridiculed after he claimed scientific evidence from moorland management was in fact a ‘phoney war’ and dismissed much of the restoration work carried out by moorland manager as a ‘load of nonsense’ and a ‘insidious distortion of science’.
The Countryside Alliance, bemused by the claims, responded at the time, saying: “The tone and content of [Pat Thompson’s] the presentation are fundamentally different to the normal public position taken by the RSPB. You will never usually hear the society writing off the thousands of miles of grips blocked on grouse moors to restore blanket bog as ‘phoney’. Nor does the RSPB usually describe the GWCT, with which it has worked extensively, as ‘nasty and insidious’ and claim that it is ‘distorting and discrediting science”.
Yet, this has not stopped Thompson from launching barrage of abuse towards moorland managers over the years since then and accusations against management techniques that simply do not add up.
Soon after that Thompson was at it again, this time on Channel 4 where claimed controlled burning of vegetation during the burning season is the 'equivalent of burning rainforests' and that it 'dries out the peat.'
Yet, in comical absurdity, in the same segment of video, a gamekeeper is shown squeezing water out of peat having just had the top vegetation managed by a controlled burn. It is once again either embarrassing ignorance of the part of Thompson or, more likely, yet another attempt to deliberately misrepresent the facts of moorland management in order to fulfil a personal vendetta.
Last month Thompson was once again throwing questionable-at-best claims around when he appeared as the ‘expert guest’ in Tom Aspinall’s ludicrous documentary about grouse shooting in the Peak District, which we discussed earlier this week.
Early on in the documentary Thompson claims that: ‘There is no such thing as a kind of heather moorland… If you think about the constituent habitats, heaths and bogs, then you think about them in a rather different way, and the drainage, burning, grazing have all dried out the landscape and allowed Heather to prosper. The blanket bog ecosystem isn't meant to be Heather dominated, it is meant to be wet”.
Yet, this claim completely ignores the fact that only 30% of the Pead District is even possible to ‘rewet’ and the fact that gamekeepers across the country have been creating bog flushes for insects for over 40 years.
If Thompson had chosen to be an ‘honest expert’, he would have talked about the widespread damage done to the Peak District from industrial pollution, rather than grouse shooting, which has been widely recognised by organisations such as Moors for the Future. Furthermore, you would have thought that a credible Uplands Policy Officer would have recognised that open heather moorland is a unique and important habitat for many important species, including ground nesting birds and of course mountain hares. But I guess honesty would have been too much to hope for from a senior member of the RSPB.