Uplands Blog

Spring has well and truly arrived over the last few weeks. The hillsides are a lot noisier with the return of curlew and lapwing. The black grouse are less in need of shelter with the weather cheering up, so sightings in the woodlands have dropped off, but there’s plenty of other animals to distract us whilst we’re out.

Greyhens are sensitive to disturbance, often leaving their broods unattended, making studying them during this critical period challenging. One potential solution is by monitoring of birds remotely through the use of GPS tags.

Thank you to all to all those who met in February at Barnard Castle for the 2025 Upland Game Conference. The overall message was clear: to safeguard a future for grouse moor management, upland estates across England and Scotland must work together and do their best to capture as much data as possible, using the latest technology.

The Upland Game Conference, formerly known as the North of England Grouse Seminar, has revamped for 2025 to offer something for landowners, land managers, gamekeepers, and conservationists alike.

Sam is one of the newly started graduate interns with the Uplands Research team, working in the North Pennines.

A local artist heard about our image of a stoat predating a curlew nest and wished to paint it whilst recuperating from a major operation.

I recently read Jeff Knott’s blog on the RSPB website – “There’s something very special about the uplands” – and I couldn’t agree more with the title. But on reading the rest of the blog, I felt obliged to respond. Not to reinforce the ‘contested landscape’ notion but to ask for a bit more tolerance. Just because you might not agree with someone’s viewpoint it doesn’t mean they are wrong, and you are right.

The late May bank holiday is never much of a holiday for our Scottish uplands research team. This date often marks the start of our grouse chick-catching period. There is a window of just a few weeks to get around all the study areas to record the tick burdens – before the chicks are large enough to fly away from us.

We have used trail cameras to provide a unique insight into the nesting behaviour of this elusive and secretive bird, which nests on heather moorland in northern England.

A new fieldwork season has begun and along with it a new project, bringing new tasks. The maternal red grouse condition project commenced in March when 70 red grouse hens were caught from seven different study sites in Upper Teesdale, North Pennines.