Your feedback on this blog

Here is a selection (every 10th comment, listed chronologically (earliest at top of list)) of the free-text comments in answer to ‘Your opportunity to give feedback of any kind on my blog or anything else you like’.

 

Excellent, well informed.

Always very interesting and refreshing to read what needs to be said unencumbered by organisational constraints. Always well balanced, evidence based, and articulate. Keep it up Mark and thank you for being the voice for nature and the voice for change (for the better)!

It’s the most stimulating conservation forum currently available!

Thank you for enlightening me on what goes on outside of my urban bubble. I know you do lot of talks. Would be good to see some these recorded on video. I look forward to 2015 with anticipation of a ban building so much that Labour call for it in their manifesto

I do not comment often. As a tenant farmer I need to have an alias! We do lots of conservation work on the farm and find the RSPB to be very helpful. [A named RSPB staff member] was here last week asking for our advice! Buglife helped create a B line meadow last year. I worry that some of the Wildlife Trusts have grouse moor owners as trustees. Keep up the good work

I think it’s been a bad political year for wildlife, but at last I think the tide may be turning. Listen to the Scottish gamekeepers latest plea for a law change to allow them to control BOPs. They are under pressure and feeling that they are losing the publicity battle. Fight hard, keep fighting, and that tide will turn and perhaps all wildlife has a chance to be considered as part of our future.

I support your position on wildlife crime in its entirety I don’t support all your opinions I don’t support your position on how to deal with driven grouse shooting, but I support your use of the petition to get attention for it I would like to hear a blog on your view of the recent ramblings by Matt Ridley on your involvement in poor science for the neonectiids ban, I was surprised by that (follow the link in his post on it to another blog that has a photo of a doc with your name in it) Best wishes and happy new year

Keep up the good work, but don’t assume that you are always preaching to the converted.

Keep up the good work Mark. I’d not heard of you before this year but your a useful conduit of information. Merry xmas.

almost always interesting, don’t always agree, not too po-faced survey didn’t have a don’t know column

From a Norfolk resident, your blog entertains, informs and amuses every morning before work and evrry evening when I get home. I have paid particular attention to your Catfield blogs. This case has increased my disatisfaction with ea and ne who except for a few admirable individuals are driven by politics and pressure rather than science and ecology. Voices such as yours ensure there is pressure from ‘our’ side and I thankyou personally for that. Your words are an inspiration and a reassurance that our nation may overcome the current malaise toward conservation one day. Please keep pressure on with Catfield, it is not over yet, not with Ms Truss in post and NFU lobbying heavily. Them Norfolk lettuces are critical for feeding the nation and keeping the economy afloat, apparently.

Great work. Very informative. Continue putties pressure on the wildlife criminals

Keep up the good work. Your blog is the first thing I check on waking and sets me up mentally for the day.

its great. a good source of information, of how and where to apply pressure, good contributions and contributors and good debate. I also like your more ‘lyrical’ writing. could happily do without the cartoon, but understand you need a rest, and the book reviews I generally leave. I like good company, good weather (and bad) and the outdoors.

Keep it up – I like the frequency and variety

I encourage my youngsters to read your blog and “all” the comments to get a rounded view on what is going on in the world of consevation.

Love them. Really interesting. Thanks Mark!

Always enjoy your blog.

Please keep fighting.You’ve done a great deal to raise the profile of wildlife conservation at a critical (and very depressing) time. Thank you so much for this. And give up on Labour – they don’t have a long-term perspective, they don’t care about the environment and they are not addressing in any substantive or consistent way the fundamental issues that face us as a society and as a species. Join the Green Party !

Stop driving the RSPB into the extremist corner

I think field sports can do a lot of good for conservation, planting of woods and wild bird plots etc.

Keep up the good work of exposing the “nature haters” e.g. NFU, Countryside Alliance, Gamekeepers organisations, BASC, Conservative Party, UKIP

Always an interesting read. Keep it up!

An excellent blog and I particularly like some of the summaries you provide e.g. key reasons why we should ban driven grouse shooting and an overview of supportive actions we can take for conservation such as e-petitions. The guest blogs are also very informative, it’s great to see the range of people involved in different aspects of conservation and the passion they have for their particular area of interest. Overall the blog inspires me to speak up, speak out and be more active for wildlife. Thank you

A move to deal with LACS is a bad one and you would not continue to get my support.

Always an excellent read speaking the truth about the environment and nature. Standing up for nature on important issues

Always well written, unfortunately never balanced

Less entrenched views would be appreciated, not all gamekeepers poison birds of prey.

Very anti shooting. Often boring.

This is a truly terrible questionaire, biased and of zero value to anyone other than maybe the eejit who wrote it

More on Walshaw please. Have you dug deep enough there? Why no outcry from you or RSPB on outcome of the General Licence review by NE? Why are the NGO’s not fighting for NE? Big budget cuts for it forecast for next year. How many people with an ecological qualification now appear in their management hierarchy?

Some reasonable articles, some poorly researched.

Really enjoy your blog Mark. Usually the first thing I read over breakfast. Keep up the pressure on both the bad guys and the good guys that seem to have lost their way a bit.

Please excuse my coyness for never posting comments.

Thanks for all you are doing to help make people think about what conservation it’s and what it could be, and also for showing how effective social media can be to help spread the message

driven grouse shooting protects a great deal of wildlife and it is being prooven that managed moorland holds more birds than that unmanaged

You have the right to say what you do, I disagree with you most of the time. As a shooting man I do not like the WWT, RSPB and BASC working together. Its a war to save shooting and BASC staff should be take out and XXXXXX for working with the enemy

Your blog is a self optionated load of rubbish designed only to further your own interest from the self pity of uneducated public members whose lack of knowledge of their opinions only proves how easy it is to sway public feeling based on your ill founded rants ! Mine over the countryside belongs to no one but should be appreciated by all for all it provides wether you agree with it or not people have vested interests and good jobs that provide community something politicians talk about but know nothing about your included in that

Love your blog – informative and entertaining

Don’t ban any sort of hunting/shooting as it keeps the countryside in order…

Driven grouse shooting is a perfectly legal and traditional U.K. country sport and it involves conservation of habitat for many species of birds in addition to grouse. The opposition to it seems to be a relatively recent phenomenon from people who are not only out of touch with reality but also incapable of debating the subject rationally with those who are prepared to spend good money to conserve the native grouse population. The objectors often seem to promote their cause by acting like terrorists, i.e. by wearing masks and acting aggressively, I believe their motivation is based on a combination of jealousy of the people who shoot, and their need continually to create new ways of stimulating gullible subscribers to maintain the objectors salaries and blatant propaganda machines. It is a matter for conjecture as to the number of objector activists who could secure a regular income from “normal” jobs occupied by their subscribers.

Before anyone goes and starts banning things they need to fully understand everything about it not just the particular ‘banned’ thing. In this case the habitat and the wildlife impacts should a ban go ahead. No grouse, no new heather, no song birds, heather beetle munching away, no heather, moorland turned to moonscapes of dead ground with nothing there except decay. Then there is a direct human impact too. In the community I live in over 75% of them rely on Grouse shooting to make a living. Then their families etc etc. Remove this income the moors will be decimated so will the community.

It’s required reading for all in the environment sector, all politicians and everyone else for that matter

I think that your blog has become an important point of reference for anyone who cares about wildlife and wishes to keep up to date with the issues and, hopefully, campaign about it. Martin Harper’s blog is also good but I find yours more entertaining to read.

I would like to see it look a bit more professional. The layout is a bit bland and looks a little amateurish. A proper make over would give the content more weight and cachet if that makes sense. I think your ‘brand’ would benefit from a custom website rather than a off the shelf blog.

Most of The Environment is sea.

This has been an interesting year for I joined Twitter, discovered Mark Avery and his blog and the debate around grouse shooting and Hen Harriers has been a new subject for me. While I have signed the petition as I am fed up with the killing of raptors and the lack of culpability for landowners I still don’t feel assured that vast tracts of upland Britain would be good habitats if the estates were not managed for shooting. I sometimes wake up here and fear I’m in bed with some who are anti-land ownership in principle and/or against the killing of any animal which is contrary to my own conservative (small c) convictions. I had not heard of the Game and Wildlife Conservation Trust before this year and sometimes, the way they are denigrated here when they seem to do a lot of good work, makes me wonder. On the whole though I enjoy this blog and admire Mark’s drive (excuse the pun!) and passion and we need a bit of an uncomfortable ride sometimes in order to make important points.

Excellent blog always important up to date information

Keep it up. Good that someone is holding the conservation movement to account. Great that you are campaigning for hen harriers and farmland birds in particular

you get understandably angry at times I feel your efforts will be better rewarded if you try to limit the times anger dominates your writing and speaking.

I find the blog very informative. However, I usually forget to look at it unless I see a tweet about it.

I’m passionate about saving all our raptors & abhor the way they are being slaughtered on moorland & large estates. It’s abhorrent!

Just keep doing what you’re doing Mark, you are needed.

Thanks for standing up for Nature.

You’re an inspiring figure Mark, please keep up the good work. Your hen harrier work in particular must, I’m sure, have resulted in you receiving lots of negative comments, personal attacks etc., but it feels like we’re starting to make real progress here and I believe that that is largely due to your efforts. Best wishes.

I enjoy the blog Mark even though I don’t agree with everything that you say. I don’t think that there is much to choose between the main political parties on env. policies and I wouldn’t (necessarily) vote as indicated above if the env. were my sole and over-riding concern. I think you’ve been very useful in radicalising the RSPB to some extent on a range of issues but at times you are rather too close to the party line on certain issues such as windfarms (offshore and onshore). The line that the RSPB (rather than, say, Greenpeace) should perhaps be the untenable one of nuclear. I still feel you haven’t dealt with the issue of what large landowners will do with their moors if and when driven grouse are BANNED. I fear the worst in fact. There are ways to make money from large holdings in the north other than driven grouse and many of these are far more damaging to overall biodiversity than the current status quo (as we saw in the 1970s when grouse moors were in the doldrums).

Many of the areas that I watch birds on are managed by Gamekeepers. They have many more birds than the unkeepered / unmanaged areas, yet you seem to class the whole shooting fraternity as law breakers and bad for Nature. This is not my experience but I agree that there is a significant minority that are law breakers. I do shoot myself, very infrequently, but I do enjoy the challenge and the game dishes I can enjoy afterwards too. We do not need new rules, just implement the existing ones properly. The punishment for the recent example of the keeper that was caught with dead Birds of Prey was totally inadequate and no deterrent at all.

I’d love to read every day’s post but life just isn’t that easy. I do follow as much as possible and I like the balanced views which are better expressed than some of the more extreme blogs. The latter encourage bad language and extremism, yours doesn’t.

Keep up the good work.

Excellent stuff, Mark. Keep up the good work! And come to Shetland…

Keep up the good work, fighting for birds (and other wildlife) and suchlike!

Thanks for the effort you put into producing it. I’m Scottish, so a lot of what you write about is Anglo-centric, but still useful to see what is happening in what is an increasingly seperate country

I enjoy your blog,and have just started commenting on such things (I recently did on the Telegraph website after the recent Charles Moore article. It does sadden me to read all of the vitriolic posts and misinformed opinions, but it’s really fascinating and enlightening to have these discussions, even if many are intransigent (probably on both sides of the debate, whatever that debate may be)

Keep up the good work and fight the good fight. I think highlighting other issues on the driven grouse shooting/criminality angle is important. I think a decisive shift in perceptions on related issues might cause most movement in the political debate. Look at causes and costs of wildfires caused by muirburn, CO2 emmissions, the changes in conservation status of some iconic species like mountain hares, subsides for the rich landowner and really look at the proceeeds of crime legislation. If we can confiscate an egg-collectors car, we need to give some serious thought to what we can confiscate from a criminal keeper and a landowner. From my discussions with police officers it seems that only keepers are allowed to delibrately break the law with firearms and get to keep their firearms certificate. That can’t be right and the police are apparently scared to infringe on a keepers “right” to hold a shotgun licence. Does it require members of the public to write to the police and complain about a specific convicted keeper being unfit to hold a firearms licence for this issue to progress? Perhaps a blog from a lawyer on this? I bet there would be lots of comments and feedback. I also think comparisons between what Scotland and England are doing differently on this issue is worthy of comment. Cheers

Mark, you are one of very few people unafraid to get stuck into conservation issues and not pussy foot around. Of course it helps that you’re independent of other organizations. Keep up the good work. I may comment on your blog in the future!

I do not complete on line surveys because most survey organisations leave a trailing cookie in your computer. I strongly object to this. However I have completed your survey as I support your activities – apart from your ‘promotion’ of the Labour party. Clearly politicians and their policies have a major impact on our environment but why not present a ‘non partisan’ aspect to environmental matters in your blog.

Fewer higher quality tweets.

An honest opinion? One sided anti rubbish, but good for a laugh!

I find your posts to be thoughtful, well-researched, and entirely relevant – please keep up the good work; you’re one of the best we have standing up against wildlife crime.

I am a new reader and in 2014 discovered who you are and what you do, found you through Chris Packham.

Thanks for all your efforts in highlighting raptor persecution and the abuse of our uplands.

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