YouTubers from hunting and shooting channels are lending their support to top YouTubers’ efforts to plant 20 million trees. A group of 600 YouTubers including Pewdiepie and Mr Beast have launched an initiative to plant trees under the hashtag #teamtrees. Read the story on The Verge, Mashable and Wired.
As well as donations to the effort, where every US$1 given to the Arbor Day Foundation leads to one tree planted, hunters/shooters in the UK have been growing more than 5 million new trees in the last two years. That’s the conclusion of viewer research by Fieldsports Channel, a hunting YouTube channel.
Fieldsports Channel asked its UK viewers if they have been helping to plant trees on their ground in the last two years and, if so, how many. Just over 10% of 1,500 viewers who answered the survey said yes, helping with the planting of an average 120 trees each. Extrapolated to the 480,000 ‘active’ hunting shooters in the UK (UK Home Office figures), that produces a figure of 5.76 million trees. This is part of the 11 million trees the UK government wants to see planted between 2017 and 2022. Read the press release here.
Hunters rely on trees to create habitat for game, whether that’s deer or gamebirds such as pheasants. As a result, almost all of the UK’s woodland you see is hunting ground.
Watch Fieldsports Channel’s Roy Lupton stalking deer in woodland in the South of England:
“Where hunting is banned, trees are often the first victims,” says Fieldsports Channel presenter Charlie Jacoby. “The wildlife soon follows. Hunting pays for habitats that benefit a huge range of wildlife.
“A successful tree has good access to water and lives in a habitat where deer, beavers and squirrels are managed.
“Hunters, shooters and anglers work for healthy, managed woodland, healthy, managed upland, clean water in our river basins and plenty of it, and oceans bursting with life. Most of what makes Britain beautiful is thanks to us.
“We are against crazy plans like the Scottish government’s mass slaughter of deer. Sea anglers were fighting against sewage long before surfers.”
Hunting and angling channels are among the largest sectors of YouTube’s sport and wildlife sections. To see a hunting channel YouTuber ranking, click here.
Here is Mr Beast’s #teamtrees video:
Charlie Jacoby recently went shooting in China, where the target is 1 trillion trees. Watch his film here:
