Purple Heather, Brown Truth

The ling, or common heather, has reached its peak bloom just days before the start of the grouse shooting season — the annual spectacle in which profit and sport take precedence over the land itself. This year, the display is patchy. Whole swathes have turned a brittle reddish-brown, appearing dead but showing faint signs of regrowth on close inspection. Elsewhere, scattered lilac blooms stand marooned in seas of brown. Even a single path can mark the divide, as here on Newton Moor, where one side thrives and the other lies blighted.

The culprit is the heather beetle (Lochmaea suturalis), a long-standing part of the moorland ecosystem, present for millennia before humans began reshaping the land into the managed heather monocultures that now serve the grouse shooting industry. Normally, the beetle’s numbers are kept in check by natural predators — parasitic wasps, ladybirds, spiders, and ants — whose own population cycles control beetle outbreaks.

But intensive management for grouse shooting has shifted that balance. Outbreaks are now more frequent and more destructive. The Moorland Association, ever the loyal mouthpiece of the industry, points to environmental factors — hotter, drier summers, milder winters — and even whispers the phrase “climate change,” though without acknowledging the role of its own members’ practices¹Beeston, Rob. The Heather Beetle Threat and How To Manage It. The Moorland Association. 16 Apr 2025. https://www.moorlandassociation.org/post/the-heather-beetle-threat-and-how-to-manage-it [Accessed 9 August 2025].

Burning was once the default response to beetle damage, but now even the Association admits recovery can happen without it. They propose other interventions: cutting, drainage, and more of the same “management” that has coincided with the worst outbreaks on record. Drainage in particular is telling — by reducing humidity, it hampers beetle egg hatching, a convenient outcome for those who wish to keep moors dry and uniform for grouse, even if it comes at the expense of the wider ecosystem and dales folk downstream who will have to bare the risk of flooding by sediment laden rivers.

The beetle is not the enemy here. The real threat is an industry that sees the moor not as a living landscape, but as a game farm in need of constant, profitable control.

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  Beeston, Rob. The Heather Beetle Threat and How To Manage It. The Moorland Association. 16 Apr 2025. https://www.moorlandassociation.org/post/the-heather-beetle-threat-and-how-to-manage-it [Accessed 9 August 2025]