Saving an icon of the Uplands
The Black Grouse Range Expansion Project is funded by Natural England’s Species Recovery Programme Capital Grant Scheme. The project aims to safeguard black grouse against potential negative impacts of climate change, through instigating measures to help increase breeding success, and by expanding the current range of black grouse into the North York Moors using a conservation translocation technique. We aim to re-establish populations in places where environmental conditions of lower rainfall and warmer temperatures in June may now be more suitable than within their current North Pennine range.
Black grouse are red-listed as a species of high conservation concern. In England, they are now largely restricted to the North Pennines, which includes parts of County Durham, Northumberland, Cumbria and North Yorkshire. Here, numbers remain broadly stable, fluctuating between 1,000-2,000 displaying males over the last 25 years.
We aim to re-establish black grouse into the North York Moors, which according to historic records have not been recorded breeding here since the mid 1800s.
You can follow our story here if you are interested in learning more about who we are and what we’re aiming to achieve through this project.
Black grouse
Lyrurus tetrix (Linnaeus, 1758)
A grouse of moorland and forest edge, the black grouse is best known for its early morning spring-time gatherings, called ‘leks’, where the males gather to compete for females. They display by fanning out their elaborate, lyre-shaped tails and inflating their necks to signal their vigour and defend or claim their territory. Their song consists of a long, dove-like bubbling coo or murmur, The hens arrive at the lek to pick the overall healthiest male, which they will mate with.
Males are jet black with long, curved tail feathers. They have a slim white stripe in the wing and white feathers under the tail. Females are well camouflaged with finely barred brown and black plumage and have a cackling call. The female takes all responsibility for nesting and rearing the chicks.
Black grouse favour a mosaic of moorland habitats and marginal farmland that are near to woodland, and the species initially benefited from the planting of commercial forestry plantations following the Second World War. However, as these plantations matured, they have become unsuitable for the species. Changes in land management have taken a toll on the population in modern times.
The project: Brood foraging and range expansion
The project has two main objectives:
- To gain a greater understanding of brood foraging habitats in the North Pennines
- To move male and female birds from their current stronghold in the North Pennines to the North York Moors
Brood-foraging habitats
In northern England, black grouse chicks hatch in June and require large quantities of insects in the first two to three weeks after hatching to grow fast and survive. Successful foraging and survival appear to be a trade-off between the abundance of preferred insects and weather conditions in June when chicks hatch.
The first part of the project has included fitting hens with GPS tags. The tracking of these hens and their chicks will provide us with data, collected remotely, which allows us to determine their daily foraging ranges and locate evening roosting locations of breeding females without disturbing them to collect chick droppings to investigate diet.
In spring, seven females were caught at night and fitted with GPS tags. These tags allow us to track their movements as they nest, hatch their broods and take them foraging for food.
Once chicks hatched, we visited known chick feeding locations the day after, to sample insect abundance by sweep netting, collect droppings from chick roost piles to quantify chick diet and survival, and take vegetation height, structure, and composition measures. Collecting this data will allow us to relate brood habitat usage and subsequent brood survival to insect abundance, sward height, structure and composition. This information will be then used to help inform grazing regimes to create the desired brood-rearing habitats in rough grasslands on the moorland fringe.
Range expansion to the North York Moors
The second phase of the project will involve re-establishing black grouse into suitable habitats in the North York Moors.
These more easterly, low-altitude sites have markedly lower rainfall than the wetter, high-altitude sites in the North Pennines. Here suitable connected habitats on the fringes of grouse moors, where gamekeepers provide protection from predators, have the potential to support a network of connected lekking groups. The nearest black grouse are currently 30-40km away in the Pennines, separated by an effective barrier of lowland grassland-cereal farmland.
Long distance dispersal by females between the two has been reported in recent years but is infrequent and appears restricted by the gap, with females typically dispersing on average 9km up to a maximum 30km, compared with males, which only move short distances.
Birds will be sourced from grouse moors in the North Pennines. Under a Natural England licence, birds will be caught at night, transported to the release site and released immediately. A sample of birds will be equipped with radio transmitters to allow us to follow settlement patterns, survival and lekking behaviour.
In England, we now find that black grouse are confined to the uplands where 96% of the remaining English population live on the edges of moors managed for driven red grouse. Here, they benefit from the protection from generalist predators and the retention of moorland habitats. For these reasons, all the sites in the North York Moors chosen for translocation are on the edges of estates where grouse management takes place.