Shooting – good for wildlife?

BBC Countryfile magazine has a poll about the good that shooting does in the countryside following the Countryfile programme last Sunday. The poll asks ‘Does the shooting industry do more good than harm to Britain’s wildlife?’.  I know several people who have voted in the opposite way to that which they intended because of the…

BTO Winter Thrush Survey

Last week I did my Big Society thing for the BTO winter thrush survey.  There was a spell of what we will have to call fine weather in the morning and I was out looking for blackbirds, song thrushes, mistle thrushes, redwings and fieldfares, and indeed waxwings and starlings, and indeed anything else that might…

Partridges up a tree

I’m pretty sure that most readers of this blog won’t be looking in pear trees for their partridges but even looking around the edges of arable fields you may struggle to see many of them. Despite all the excellent work that has been done to study the grey partridge (much of which is summarised in…

Bring in the bunting…

In amidst all that buzzard-bothering nonsense of the last couple of weeks an important restatement of the absolutely obvious was made: farmland birds have declined steeply and there is no obvious redemption in sight. The most recent science on the subject was a report produced from national bird monitoring schemes across Europe, including the UK,…

Fair enough Minister

On Monday I did an interview for the BBC Farming Today programme, with the NFU’s Guy Smith.  If you want to listen to that interview you can but you won’t learn anything new from it as the NFU is still in denial over the loss of farmland wildlife and the role that farming has played…