Guest Blog Don’t shoot! – by Giles Bradshaw.

♦ May 18, 2012 ♦ 22 Comments

Giles Bradshaw owns a small farm near Exmoor.  He campaigns for the law to be changed to allow for non-lethal dispersal of wildlife using dogs and for a wide-ranging ban on cruelty to wildlife.

 

A gamekeeper was recently prosecuted for breaking the Hunting Act near Spalding.  The court heard that he was found using terriers to flush foxes from their dens.  Mr Bycroft’s actions were within the law except for one crucial aspect.  He had written permission to flush the foxes and good reason to do so under the law.  However he failed to kill the pregnant vixen but rather placed it in a small barrel in order to relocate it.  He was fined £525 for not killing the fox.

Some time ago the hedgehogs of North Uist won a reprieve from being culled.  They were found using dogs and then relocated to the mainland – if this had been in England the use of dogs would have meant they had to be shot.  I face a similar problem when using my dogs on my farm in Devon.  In order to prevent deer congregating and causing damage in areas I have coppiced,  I patrol the area with my collie dogs.  My advice from the police and the Government is that under the Hunting Act I am allowed to do this.  However the deer must be shot as soon as possible.

I am writing this blog to try and persuade people that it’s wrong for the law to require wildlife to be killed in these circumstances and also for law enforcers to allow me to break it due to its utter idiocy.  I’d be especially interested in hearing any comments from people who support the current legal situation.
The main organisations supporting the current legal situation are the RSPCA and The League Against Cruel Sports (LACS).  The argument for the deer I flush having to be shot was articulated by the Government with LACS and RSPCA support when I took it to court under the Human Rights Act.  I felt that having to kill wildlife interfered with my peaceful enjoyment of my property.  They countered by saying it was necessary to prevent my dogs chasing and killing the deer.
My dogs have never, and could never, kill a deer, wild deer quickly outrun them.  Even if they were capable of such a feat there would be other more humane ways to prevent the deer being killed than killing them.  One could call them off or flush the deer with the dogs on a lead.  I have never killed a deer in my life.  I have no gun.
What makes matters worse is that deer come in herds.  When LACS prosecuted the Quantock Staghounds in 2007 the judge ruled that they should have had enough guns to kill the entire herd if one were present in the woods. This ruling does conform to the twisted logic behind the law because shooting just one or even nine out of ten deer would be an ineffective way of preventing the remaining deer from being chased.  I am not against all killing of wildlife but to me gunning down a herd of running deer is cruel and barbaric in the extreme because there is a high wounding risk.  If one waits till the herd is standing still before taking them out then the dogs clearly won’t be chasing them any more so it is even more stupid.
I greatly enjoy what I do, I live on my farm and feel I should be allowed to carry on as long as I am not harming wildlife.  To comply with the law I would have to go to great trouble and expense in hiring expert marksmen and it would turn a peaceful activity conducted in harmony with nature into a heart wrenching bloodbath.  In a word it would be cruel.
To me the Hunting Act is a deeply flawed piece of legislation because it fails to discriminate between non cruel and cruel activities.  What makes an activity cruel is not whether dogs are involved or not but whether undue suffering is caused.  People should have a legal duty not to be cruel when they conduct their business and this requirement should apply to hunts, farmers and conservation bodies alike.
There’s a simple way to achieve this and that is to define cruelty and make causing it illegal in any way without exception.  This is precisely what a law proposed by the Labour Lord Donoughue seeks to do.  Whatever the future of the Hunting Act I feel that the idea of banning all deliberate cruelty to wildlife should unite, not divide, all bodies involved in wildlife issues from the Countryside Alliance through the RSPB to the RSPCA and LACS.

Maybe no harriers in England? Lead poisoning suspected. And a bit of wuthering.

♦ May 17, 2012 ♦ 60 Comments

The news that there may be no hen harriers nesting in England this year is sad but this day, if it has come, was going to come soon.

Of course, extinction in England is a bit of an odd thing as England is ‘just’ a line on a map and on other sides of that line, in Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales, and indeed France and elsewhere on the continent of Europe, there are harriers flying around not realising that their English brethren have gone ‘extinct’.

It’s not the last one that matters, except symbolically, it’s the fact that there should be a few hundred hen harriers in northern England that matters – because even in the good years in the last couple of decades the best recorded numbers have been in the low double figures rather than low treble figures.

It’s the hundreds of missing hen harriers that is the outrage not the loss of the last one.

The RSPB has called for action from government to include a plan endorsed by landowning and shooting organisations.  Well, that would be nice.  But it isn’t going to happen in my opinion as we’ve all been around this circle many times before.  RSPB is going to need to come up with something a bit more imaginative than that, I fear.

And, by the way, whatever happened to those radio-tagged hen harriers that Natural England was tracking?  Where did they all end up?  May we see a map please?  Has the Minister, Richard Benyon, seen the map?  Does he recognise any of the estates on the map? Has he ever gone grouse shooting on any of the estates on the map?  Did the last hen harrier fly out of England with the map in its talons instead of a fistful of grouse?

We know the answers to some of these questions because the Minister, Richard Benyon, was asked a Parliamentary Question earlier this week by Fiona O’Donnell MP:

Fiona O’Donnell:To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs what the findings were of Natural England’s project to fit hen harriers with radio or satellite transmitters between 2002 and 2012; and if she will place in the Library any reports on this project submitted to her Department.

Richard Benyon: Natural England has undertaken intensive studies of the movements of hen harriers since 2002, as part of its hen harrier recovery project. The preliminary results have already been published in a report available on Natural England’s website and I have arranged for a copy of the report to be placed in the Library of the House. This was based on the results of tracking 106 English-born hen harriers fitted with radio or satellite transmitters in the period 2002-08. This work showed that hen harriers travel over large distances and some individuals range widely over both upland and lowland areas before returning to traditional upland heather moorland sites to breed. Since 2007 a further 13 birds have been fitted with radio or satellite transmitters as part of a PhD study of the hen harrier in England, part-funded by Natural England. The data collected from tracking these birds are currently being analysed. The work will be published as part of a PhD thesis and, if appropriate, submitted for publication in a peer-reviewed scientific journal.

Fiona O’Donnell: To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs what steps her Department has taken to reduce persecution of hen harriers under the Wildlife Crime Priority for raptor persecution.

Richard Benyon: DEFRA co-chairs the UK wildlife crime tasking and co-ordinating group, where it has supported the inclusion of raptor persecution as a wildlife crime priority for the last four years. The hen harrier is one of six priority species for wildlife crime action.

In 2011 DEFRA stepped up its involvement by participating in the police-led raptor persecution wildlife crime priority delivery group. The group’s objective is to raise, community trust and awareness to encourage intelligence and incident reporting, which should in turn lead to prevention and enforcement activity for raptor persecution.

 

I’ve looked on the Natural England website and I can’t find anything meaningful about this study.  I may be looking in the wrong places – all I did was go to their website and put ‘hen harrier radiotracking’ into the search engine there so I could easily have missed a study which radiotracked hen harriers.  I’ll have to phone the Natural England enquiry line, Telephone: 0845 600 3078 (local rate), between 0830 and 1700 tomorrow to ask them to point me in the right direction.  If you are interested in this subject then you might want to do the same.

My guess, is that the NE study shows that a lot of birds disappear, or their transmitters cease to function, in areas managed primarily for shooting, mostly grouse shooting, in the north of England.  It’s only a guess of course, and it could be that there is something in the air that prevents the transmitters from working in such places – my guess would be lead.  But it’s just a guess and I can easily be proved wrong by a map.  Let’s see the map, please.

And while I am at it,  I’d like to remind NE that while they said that they needed another 20 days to fulfill my FoI requests I can’t see any reason why they couldn’t have put a few reports in the post quite some time ago and I expect them to arrive tomorrow.  I shall be making a formal complaint on their lack of fulfilment of any of my request if these documents do not arrive by the end of the week.  Sorry – but you are, in my opinion, just mucking me about.

The toad that croaked

♦ May 16, 2012 ♦ 22 Comments

Yesterday was an anniversary – I don’t think many people noticed it.

Does it matter that a small, bright, shiny toad was last seen on Earth on 15 May 1989 – does extinction matter?

, via Wikimedia Commons”]

By Bufo_periglenes1.jpg: Charles H. Smith, vergrößert von Aglarech derivative work: Purpy Pupple [Public domain

The golden toad was only discovered in the Monte Verde cloud forests of Costa Rica in 1966, by herpetologist Jay Savage and yet it was gone 23 year later.  It, like many amphibians, was the victim of a whole range of threats and assaults from fungal diseases (perhaps made more virulent by climate change), habitat loss, air pollution and short term weather impacts.  It lived underground for much of the year and mated in seasonal pools in the forest where the brightly coloured golden, males would compete to mate with the larger red-spotted dark females.

This handsome prince of a toad was described by its finder as looking as though they were painted with enamel paint and ecologist Martha Crump described them as  ‘dazzling jewels on the forest floor’ and ‘one of the most incredible sights I’ve ever seen’.

A third of amphibians are threatened with global extinction with the Caribbean area being particularly extreme: in Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, and Jamaica four out of five amphibians are facing extinction.

Arguably the frogs,  toads, salamanders and newts are more sensitive indicators of global change than birds (where c12% of the world’s species face extinction) or mammals (where 25% are endangered) because their wet skin is sensitive to pollution, increased ultra-violet radiation, fungal diseases and they suffer from the usual threats of introduced species  and habitat destruction too.  High amphibian extinction rates, the gorgeous golden toad is one of scores of species to have exited the planet in recent decades, are a strong indication that we are not living sustainably on Earth.  How can threatening the very existence of a third of the harmless frogs, toads and newts who share the planet with us be sustainable? Indeed, is not the maintenance of species on earth a sine qua non of any definition of sustainable development?

In just over a month’s time, and 20 years after they last assembled there, the world’s politicians will gather in Rio de Janeiro.  Last time they were at what came to be known as the ‘Earth Summit’ whereas this time the focus is on sustainable development.  Will the golden toad get a mention? Perhaps it should, as its demise is just a single data point in what scientist now say is the planet’s sixth extinction crisis where extinction rates are 100 to 1000 times as great as the natural background level.  Not since the dinosaurs stopped roaming the Earth, 65 million years ago, have extinction rates been as high.

In 1992, the world drafted the Convention on Biological Diversity and in the following two decades it has been ratified, accepted or approved by 193 nations from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe.  Only four countries have not got around to adopting this global convention to maintain life on Earth: South Sudan (which has the excuse that it is a very new country), Andorra (a shame, but do we really care?), the Holy See (a remarkable lapse of moral leadership) and the United States of America.

Last time around a Conservative Prime Minister, John Major, went to Rio and ‘got’ biodiversity.  When he returned, he and his Environment Secretary, John Gummer, reinvigorated UK domestic nature conservation through funding, speeches and making the conservation of nature a moral necessity.  Those were the days when politicians spoke passionately about our stewardship of the planet, how nature should be conserved for its sake as well as our own and how we should even look out for dung beetles.  This time, David Cameron won’t even attend the Summit, sending Nick Clegg instead.

Under the umbrellas of ‘sustainable development’ and ‘ecosystems services’ we are in danger of side-lining the rest of life on this planet as an also-ran to the human race, only worth a thought if it is of immediate, quantifiable, financial value to our lives.  What sort of a way is that to inhabit a planet?  If the golden toad really had been made of a rare malleable metal then we might have saved it, but as it was merely unbelievably beautiful, useless and harmless we let it slip away.  We are desecrating the planet not because there isn’t a more sustainable way to live but because we aren’t really looking for that more sustainable way.  In the short term, our lifetimes, a bit more desecration suits us just fine; and if every generation acts the same then the desecration never ends.

A global meeting on sustainable development should tackle these issues but I have low hopes of world ‘leaders’ finding a way to lead us out of the sixth extinction crisis on the planet.  Perhaps, to focus the minds of the delegates, the songs of the humpback whale or the sound of rainforest trees crashing to the ground as the chainsaws whirr, should be played in the streets, the bars, and the lifts of Rio for the length of the Summit.  I wish they would remember the toad that croaked.

Marmite revisited

♦ May 15, 2012 ♦ 12 Comments

, via Wikimedia Commons”]

By User Dave Dinneen on en.wikipedia ("I took this picture." Please, give it back.) [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html), CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/) or CC-BY-SA-2.5-2.0-1.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5-2.0-1.0)

Marmite – you may love it or hate it.

Wildlife NGOs – you may love them or hate them.

The results of the polls on this website over your favourite and least favourite wildlife NGOs produced a lot of interesting results.

I guess it doesn’t really matter that much to Marmite how many people hate them, provided lots of people love them.  The more people love them, the more Marmite is sold.  If the people who don’t buy Marmite just dislike it slightly or hate it doesn’t matter too much provided there is a big enough pool of Marmite lovers out there.  To sell Marmite you need to find lots of Marmite lovers and get them hooked.

Now wildlife NGOs aren’t quite the same as Marmite, but I think that there are some parallels.  The fact that the RSPB scored more positive votes than any of the other listed organisations is significant.  But is the high number of negative votes significant too – or should the RSPB shrug it off as unimportant?

I think the difference between the RSPB and Marmite is that the RSPB has to try to persuade governments, civil servants, land owners and others that it has good ideas and that could mean that  lots of people hating you is a bad idea.  Or is it?

I think it depends – things usually do! It depends on why people dislike you.  If they dislike you because of your core principles and because you are trying to to changes things and they don’t want change – then it just goes with the territory.

I am a big believer in what Winston Churchill said on this subject: You have enemies? Good. That means you’ve stood up for something, sometime in your life.

If you have gone around randomly collecting enemies by neglecting to answer someone’s phone call, or giving them rude or poor service then that is awful, but if you have collected just the right enemies, the people who are fighting against you, then that is perfectly OK.
I’ll come back to this subject now and again.  But what do you think?

Oh oh!

♦ May 14, 2012 ♦ 16 Comments

I went out for a drive last week and saw a couple of red kites.  They are fantastic birds aren’t they?

If you remember I set myself the target of seeing red kites on 200 days of 2012 – and enjoying the moment each time.  I am falling short so far – I’m heading for c150 days at the current rate but that is still an awful lot of kite pleasure.

When I got home I saw that the RSPB and Herts police had issued a press release about two poisoned red kites in Hertfordshire.  One of them was found hanging, dead, in a tree at Pegsdon Hills Wildlife Trust Nature Reserve – and I’ve been there, so I thought that was interesting.  But the other had been found nearby in a place called Hexton in January – I couldn’t place Hexton so I looked it up on the web.  I thought I might have been birdwatching there so I entered ‘hexton herts birds’ into a well-known search engine and up popped a shoot.

I was just about to move on when I noticed two familiar names on the same web page: Snilesworth and Glenogil.

This is why Snilesworth is familiar to me and this is why Glenogil is a familiar name.

Bits and bits

♦ May 13, 2012 ♦ 2 Comments

Good luck to Jonny  Rankin and team in seeing as many species as possible today in Norfolk.  Looks like it will be a fine day and so my guess of 121 species looks on the low side.  I’ll give Jonny and team £1 for every species above 121 that they see -  the money goes to RSPB projects in Norfolk and Indonesia.  I think I might be looking for £30+ down the back of the sofa.  How about you?

I saw a lovely drake garganey at Stanwick Lakes yesterday and heard two nightingales on my survey square too.  There were a few orange tip butterflies in the air as well.  That was a good morning.

I haven’t seen a hobby yet this year – I normally would have done.

I thought Thursday’s episode of Planet Earth Live was really pretty good – I think they have settled own a bit.  I’ll be watching again tonight.

Here are a couple of new blogs which I’ve read; MYKY speaks and Nick Self: conservation in Wiltshire, England and I’ll keep an eye on them in future as well as giving a plug to my daughter’s blog which I enjoy reading and you might too.

I’m reading a really interesting book about how Americans cut down most of the native longleaf pine forest in the late 19th century – I hadn’t known much about it at all.

What has its anniversary on 15 May – on Tuesday?  Do you know?

The sun is shining so I’m going out to enjoy it – and I hope you do too.

 

 

 

 

Guest Blog – Big Bird Race by Jonny Rankin

♦ May 12, 2012 ♦ 10 Comments

 

About me

Based in Bury St Edmunds Suffolk, I have a number of interests but I am always content to be out birding, which is usually every day walking my dog Fender.  I do a lot of birding in Suffolk Breck but of course go further afield too.


 

Firstly many thanks for the opportunity to introduce the Big Bird Race to your readers, I am keen to tell as many audiences as possible about the day.

I notice from your Another world record coming up? post the differing comments on Bird Racing from your readers; Steve doesn’t like them owing to the carbon emissions (but then he was also broadly unhappy in his post!) whilst Chris hit the nail on the head ‘… birds remain, for me, the thing above all things’. I loved this comment and I think it offers a great introduction to why three friends and myself are doing the Big Bird Race on Sunday.

We generally do ‘a big day’ each May, starting locally and working up to the north Norfolk coast but we have never gone for the full 24 hours and nor have we prepared so much in advance. This year the principle difference is we are doing it for not just ourselves but for the RSPB and two of their campaigns.

We chose the Harapan Rainforest project to support as it has more global implications but are also very proud to be supporting the freshly launched Operation Turtle Dove campaign. All four of us consider Turtle Dove a ‘day maker’ and after reading about the problems Turtle Dove face cross-continent on migration and the resulting decline we are delighted to be supporting this operation.

Whilst the carbon emissions are a negative – I can make little excuse for them  – the drive to do something exciting to support these RSPB campaigns far outweighs this negative. As we already have and hope to have more per-species sponsors we will travel to encounter as many as possible – albeit within East Anglia!

As such feel free to visit the JustGiving page or even leave a per-species pledge via the comments section below – we are extremely proud of our fund raising to date and hope the big day will excite others too.

As Chris said birds remain for all four of us, the thing above all things.

 

Comment from Mark: Good luck to Jonny and friends on seeing lots of birds tomorrow and raising lots of money for these two good causes.

Last weekend the ‘Bird Race’ which helped launch the Wales Coast Path, which simply added up species seen by any observers from the Coastal Path through the day,  logged up a total of 140 species including a dotterel as the first bird and including red-rumped swallow and smew from the RSPB Newport Wetlands nature reserve (how many people in the UK have seen those two species on the same day before, I wonder?).  The best analysed, most perfectly assessed and long-agonised guess at the total was…mine, of 139.

The weather looks fine for Sunday in East Anglia and my guess at Jonny’s total is 121 species – this time I’ll be miles away.

In my backyard

♦ May 11, 2012 ♦ 25 Comments

Recently the Daily Telegraph reported on windfarm developments in the county where I live – Northamptonshire.  Apparently we are going to become the windfarm capital of the UK although the Telegraph only mentions 53 turbines and suggests the country (presumably England in this case) is considering applications for only 94 in total.  That doesn’t sound like very many to me.

, via Wikimedia Commons”]

Lyveden new bield as mentioned in the Daily Telegraph article Edbrambley at en.wikipedia [CC-BY-SA-2.5 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5)

I can already see 10 turbines from my house – in the distance – and those 10 turbines do tend to dominate the landscape a little as it’s surprising from how many different places one can see them.  But, as I’ve said before, I don’t mind them at all.  Indeed, I rather like them.

Would another 50 turbines being built in my county of residence upset me? Not much really – provided that they are making a real contribution to replacing more-polluting fossil fuels.

On landscape grounds I object much more strongly to the massive and ugly boxes that have sprung up locally which are storage and distribution centres.  You can see these along the A45 east of Wellingborough where they assault the eye and block what was a lovely view down into the Nene Valley, by the A45 in Raunds and further along the same road towards Peterborough where it crosses the A14 at Thrapston (and there are others).  In landscape terms I’d accept a few turbines in return for each of these boxes that disapeared if such a trade were possible.

I recognise all the place names in the Telegraph article.  I really have thought about the impact of these turbines on the local landscape.  In some cases turbines might certainly detract from the view but that might well be a price that we all have to pay to get a greener energy mix.  In an article I wrote in The Field some time ago I suggested that anyone who objected to a windfarm development should have to disclose their own carbon footprint.  It was said with my tongue in my cheek but I wonder whether those who object to this type of development are doing their bit for reducing their own climate footprint? Or whether they have any plan at all for reducing the future impacts of climate change? or whether they even believe there is a problem?

It’s vaguely interesting that it is the Queen’s cousin, the Duke of Gloucester, who has one of the applications to build turbines on his land but the general point is that these plans are not imposed on us by government they are the wishes of local people.  Some local land owners see an opportunity to make money by putting up wind turbines and those local people clearly see the benefits (perhaps largely to themselves) of turbine construction in their local landscape as being a good thing.  I don’t remember hearing the CLA or NFU being very outspoken about wind turbines and, of course, it will usually be their members who benefit most from their building.

I remember talking to a local farmer about his shelved plans to build a turbine or two on his land – there was an outcry from his neighbours in his small village and he decided to drop the plans as it all became too much of a hassle.  When we talk about local people’s views there are always likely to be two local sides to every  issue rather than just one and I think that we might discover that in how the new planning regime plays out.

The need for wind turbines is driven by global and national, not just local, issues – climate change and energy security. And the impacts of wind turbines are bound to be uneven geographically and affect different people differently even locally.  The resolution of those conflicts is the role of energy policy, planning policy, transport policy and of competing political philosophies.  Are you involved in politics – you should be?

 

Wuthering Moors 15

♦ May 10, 2012 ♦ 2 Comments

Defra, as Natural England, say that they need more time to answer my questions.

I don’t accept that they do.

But it would obviously be rather strange if after all this time, and extra time, I don’t get some very detailed and full answers to my questions.

 

 

 

A song for Guy

♦ May 9, 2012 ♦ 11 Comments

Guy Smith, NFU environment spokesperson asked for the details of species I saw on my BBS visit.  I wonder why.

I’ll do better than that Guy, I’ll list the species seen on my visit last Saturday and compare them with those seen on my first visit to this BBS square almost exactly seven years ago (8 May 2005).  Those species whose numbers contribute to the Farmland Bird Index (which reached its lowest ever level in 2010 (2011 results awaited)) are shown in bold.

 

……………………………..2005       2012

Mallard                                   1              0

Pheasant                                 4              4

Lapwing                               9              0

Stock Dove                         0              2

Woodpigeon                      19           5

Tawny Owl                          1              0

Skylark                                 23           4

Yellow Wagtail                   1              0

Wren                                     6              1

Dunnock                              0              3

Robin                                    6              2

Blackbird                           10           6

Song thrush                       0              1

Lesser Whitethroat         2              2

Whitethroat                       2              3

Blackcap                              5              1

Chiffchaff                             1              2

Willow Warbler                 2              0

Blue Tit                                 4              4

Great Tit                              3              2

Jay                                         0              1

Magpie                                 1              1

Jackdaw                               2              0

Carrion Crow                      2              3

Chaffinch                             18           15

Greenfinch                         2              0

Goldfinch                            0              1

Linnet                                   1              5

Bullfinch                               1              1

Yellowhammer                 7              0

Reed Bunting                     0              1

Birds                                     83             54

Species                                 25             23

 

Now I wouldn’t draw any conclusions from the differences between a single visit in 2007 and a single visit in 2012 – the value of my visits to this site are that I have visited it twice each year  and, using standardised methods, counted all the birds on two visits each year.  Anecdotes, whether they are from a single BBS site or a single farm (and farmer’s perhaps clouded recollection of days gone by) are no substitute for data collected by thousands of people at randomly selected locations – so the real value of my results are that they form a tiny contribution to a much much larger well-designed whole.

Now I wonder what point Guy will want to make from these observations?  Shall we wait and see?  No, let’s guess!  Guy will say that there are lots of other species recorded on this plot that aren’t in the farmland bird index.  Yes there are – and that’s because this plot contains some woodland in it – linear woodland along the thick green lane and a few small patches of woodland dotted around the square as would be expected in many parts of southern England.  Many of you could have guessed that from the bird list anyway, I know.

Quite a few of the remaining species contribute to the woodland bird index – which is also declining overall.

I wouldn’t want to make anything of the differences between these two counts but I am somewhat shocked at the changes in farmland birds which they suggest.  I expect the second visit in a month’s time will show a less dismal picture, and I haven’t shown you all the years in between, but the overall picture emerges from thousands of similar little pixels.

Over to you, Guy.