Tag Archives: shooting
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 …
Lancashire’s ‘Bowland Betty’ bites the Yorkshire dust
A female hen harrier raised in the Forest of Bowland, Lancashire, last year, and fitted with a satellite tag, was found dead on a grouse moor in the Yorkshire Dales in June this year. I hadn’t realised the trans-Pennine rivalry was so strong that the War of the Roses included shooting each other’s hen harriers. …
Raptor round up
It would be perfectly possible to write about birds of prey, how wonderful they are and their troubled and shortened lives, every day on this blog. I try not to do that because there are other sites that do it so well (raptor politics and raptor persecution Scotland) and because there are other big issues …
More good news – unless you are a raptor hater
Today the Environmental Audit Committee publishes a report on Wildlife Crime. Amongst other useful findings it recommends that the government in England and Wales introduces an offence of vicarious liability for wildlife crime (as already exists in Scotland) and makes the possession of the banned pesticide carbofuran illegal (as it already is in Scotland). In …
Guest Blog – Christopher Graffius (BASC) Lead Shot
Christopher Graffius is the Director of Communications at the British Association for Shooting and Conservation (BASC). He enjoys shooting and fishing and goes wildfowling on the Dee estuary and shoots game in North Wales. Mark Avery has invited me to contribute a “guest blog”. I’m happy to do so because I’m convinced that interaction between …
Wuthering Moors 28
In a move that will be highly embarrassing for the UK government, particularly for Defra and the Defra Minister Richard Benyon, the RSPB today launched a complaint to the European Commission over the Walshaw Moor affair. The RSPB is ‘Stepping up for Nature’ by suggesting that Natural England, the delivery agency of Defra, contravened European …
A couple of lessons
I’d quite like to write a book entitled ‘Advice to a young advocate’ which would give tips on how to influence the political system. I’d not be the right person to write all of it so I’d need a few co-authors too – I wonder what Tony Juniper would think of the idea. There are …
FSA advice on eating game
Yesterday afternoon the Food Standards Agency (FSA) published revised guidance on eating game shot with lead. It starts: ‘The Food Standards Agency is advising people that eating lead-shot game on a frequent basis can expose them to potentially harmful levels of lead. The FSA’s advice is that frequent consumers of lead-shot game should eat less …
Lead poisoning still killing lots of birds and FSA advice on human health impacts ‘delayed’.
A just-published study reveals that lead gunshot is still a threat to wild waterbirds in the UK, over a decade after the use of lead gunshot was banned in wetlands and for shooting wildfowl in England ( similar but slightly different legislation pertains elsewhere in the UK). Waterfowl ingest spent lead shot whilst feeding. Sometimes …
Turtle doves under fire
I haven’t seen a turtle dove in Northamptonshire this year and it seems I am not the only one. This was a bird that I didn’t see in the north Somerset countryside where I grew up. It was only when we came on holiday to East Anglia that I saw my first turtle dove – …