Our e-petition is still moving briskly along – this will partly be thanks to the impact of last week’s Bird Fair. Some will have heard about the e-petition for the first time at the Bird Fair (that may be difficult for some of you to believe but it’s certainly true) and also 11,000 leaflets were taken away by a small army of wonderful volunteers for distribution. I don’t know where all those leaflets went but I reckon that some noticeable surges (eg in the Brighton and Hove area) will be thanks to a few hundred leaflets. Thank you to all who have taken those leaflets and are even now walking the streets to distribute them.
I’d like to give a big ‘thank you!’ to a small group of volunteers who have distributed leaflets in the area of the former stronghold of the Hen Harrier in England – the Bowland Fells. There are several constituencies surrounding this area which have been treated to leaflets but I’ve kept a close eye on the Ribble Valley constituency of Nigel Evans MP.
Two months ago on 27 June, Ribble Valley had not yet joined the ‘100 Club’; about a month later on 24 July (total 63,000 signatures) it had joined the ‘100 Club!’; 10 days later on 3 August (70,000 signatures) Ribble Valley was #51 in the list; and a week later (80,000 signatures) it was #21. Today Ribble Valley sits proudly at #17 in the list below.
That rise was certainly partly due to the hard work of a team of volunteers who have spread the word in an area which ought to have Hen Harrier nest watches and wildlife safaris as a money-earner for the local population, and in which the logo of the Forest of Bowland AoNB is, for heaven’s sake, a Hen Harrier. And as pointed out in a Guest Blog here by Terry Pickford, it’s not just Hen Harriers – Peregrines have had a tough time of it too (and other raptors too). The volunteers in the Bowland area have done a great job over the years in monitoring raptors, and they’ve done their best to protect them from illegal persecution too, now they have put their energies into this campaign. A big thank you to you all (and the Bowland Brewery for supporting Hen Harrier Conservation).
Here’s a list of all the constituencies over 350 signatures:
- Calder Valley 748
- High Peak 538
- Ross, Skye and Lochaber 495
- Bristol West 490
- Inverness, Nairn, Badenoch and Strathspey 459
- Derbyshire Dales 458
- Brighton, Pavilion 457
- Sheffield Central 440
- Skipton and Ripon 433
- Westmorland and Lonsdale 410
- Edinburgh North and Leith 409
- Sheffield Hallam 404
- Isle of Wight 388
- Argyll and Bute 387
- Stroud 385
- Lancaster and Fleetwood 385
- Ribble Valley 384
- Thirsk and Malton 372
- North Norfolk 360
- Cambridge 354
- Suffolk Coastal 352
- Torridge and West Devon 352
- York Central 350
- Totnes 346
- Central Devon 344
- Wells 336
- Somerton and Frome 334
- South Cambs 333
- Scarborough and Whitby 333
- St Ives 331
- Edinburgh East 329
- Exeter 323
- Dumfries and Galloway 322
- Hove 320
- Brighton Kemptown 319
- West Dorset 316
- Arundel and South Downs 315
- Bridgwater and West Somerset 313
- Richmond (Yorks) 312
- South Norfolk 303
Those underlined and in bold have had at least one constituent writing to the sitting MP and expressing their support for the ban driven grouse shooting e-petition. They would all like more letters on the subject, and those not underlined and in bold must feel they are missing out. And then there is your MP – have you written to her or him?
Over 320 of you have written to your MP (about 220 of them – that’s one in three Westminster MPs) and asked them to attend the debate on driven grouse shooting in the Westminster parliament, and speak in favour of change in the uplands. That’s fantastic – but more letters will help get an even better response. I see BASC has a sophisticated automated response form available to their members – I can’t offer you that! But it would be great if you could please write to your MP and tell them that you signed the e-petition to ban driven grouse shooting – you can use these words as guidance or use your own. And if you get a response from your MP then it is likely to be a standard response.
If your MP is a Conservative then you will get a response telling you, in effect, why you are wrong and not promising to do anything on your behalf (for that is the government position). If you get that response then you could use these words to respond with a ‘firm briefing!’.
If your MP is Labour then you will get a different, and rather better (but somewhat non-committal) response. If I were you then I’d wait until we know the date of the expected debate before responding to your MP.
If your MP is SNP then you will have received (or should soon) a different standard response – I will tell you about that on Monday and suggest how you respond to it.
I will be interested to see how Lib Dem MPs respond as although they are thin on the ground these days, the e-petition has been well-supported in almost all Lib Dem constituencies (eg see list above).
Four requests;
- If you haven’t written to your MP yet, please have a go – they work for you! Here is a guide to how to go about it – it’s easy.
- If you have written to your MP to say that you supported the e-petition to ban driven grouse shooting then please tell me (if you haven’t already, [email protected]). It will be useful information in planning the next stages of the campaign.
- If you have received the current Conservative standard response then please write back to your MP – the more who respond now, the more difficult it is for this inaccurate response to continue. Here are some suggested words.
- If you have had a non-standard response from either a Conservative or Labour MP then I would be very interested in seeing it ([email protected]). MPs who move away from the crowd, in any direction, are always interesting.
[registration_form]
It is very interesting that many of the constituencies with high numbers of signatures to the petition are located on or near grouse shooting areas. I think this needs to be brought to the attention of MPs in due course.
Also worth noting, Alan, the very high numbers of signatures in places with upland heather moors that haven’t been managed for grouse in many decades e.g. Sheffield. Here we have large areas of moorland which are free from predator control and still have Red Grouse (just not massively bloated populations of them), breeding waders, and (despite the sink effect of nearby driven moors) raptors. When the grouse industry tells us we will lose everything without management for grouse shooting, it’s readily disproved by the everyday experience of locals and visitors, let alone the careful study by local naturalists. Do we need to work with local farmers to get a more harmonious ratio of sheep and cattle? Sure, and it’s being done. Do we need to get a few fields out of silage production and back to traditional haymeadows? Sure, and that’s starting to be done. Do we need to replace some exotic conifer plantations with native woodland? Well that’s happening too. Do we need to work with grouse moor managers? Absolutely not, we simply need rid of them.
That’s sounds very encouraging, especially to a southerner.
It seems that these DGS-free moors need to be flagged up +++
to counter the propaganda (lies) by the DGS brigade.
Bowland is appalling isn’t it. And the logo makes it doubly ironic. I came across a piece in BBC Wildlife magazine (Nov07, p31) saying that Forest of Bowland had fledged 30 Hen Harrier chicks (thirty, imagine!), ‘the best year since Natural England began a recovery project for the species in 2002’. The project manager Stephen Murphy ‘attributed success to co-operation with game-keepers to ensure the birds could raise their chicks in peace’. In other words, the g-k’s got together and agreed, for some reason, not to kill them all off that year. And since then????
I’ve spent a fortnight in the Forest of Bowland on two separate week long residential conservation projects. They principally involved the removal of rhododendron from woodland. The woods were on farms and I’m certain the rhoddie would have been planted to provide cover for pheasants. So there you go if it’s not incinerated, wildlife free ‘moor’ for blasting grouse, it’s rhoddie choked, wildlife poor woodland for blasting pheasant. I didn’t find the FoB that pretty, we have plenty of barren open ground here in Scotland and I most certainly didn’t see much wildlife. Interestingly I’ve just watched another nauseating pro grouse moor video in which the head keeper mentioned 9 guests the estate had for mid winter pheasant shooting who had noted that they were the only customers in the local pubs, aren’t the moors great for bringing in business! Well when we were working voluntarily in the FoB we did a fair amount of local shopping and certainly were no strangers to the pubs, it was over New Year. Difference is we did something of benefit to the local community and wildlife – not maintain an ecological slum and try and pimp it as a wildlife haven.
Get that pub to use one year seasoned rhodo.: Lovely, clean, hot burn.
Interesting to see Inverness, Nairn, Badenoch and Strathspey at #5 – anything to do with the mass poisoning of red kites and other raptors in the Black Isle last year?
Today’s word: bant
Ribble Valley takes another hearty stride adding 6 signatures today to move into equal 13th position (with Isle of Wight)
Today’s signatures: 131
I took the liberty of seeing how the ‘Protect grouse Moors and grouse shooting’ petition was doing. From 3.15PM to the end of the day it managed to just beat our lowest day in many weeks; 47/43 signatures.
To date they are beating us in;
Richmond (Yorkshire): 365/313
Chelsea and Fulham: 316/90
Cities of London and Westminster: 168/136
Battersea: 162/107
Kensington: 152/115
Now, I’m certainly very grateful to those signing in any part of the land, be it rural or urban, and I’ll grant you that Richmond most definitely has grouse moors, but this all seems rather confusing; weren’t we meant to be the ones to be casually dismissed as townies?
Of yeah; the day ended on 118,223.
Thanks for your reply on previous entry, Mark! As I didn’t get an automatic response e-mail back from my MP, I wonder if our mails ever end up in their ‘spam’ boxes, and so don’t get seen? (Although my incoming mail is usually in the right box, just occasionally something goes in the Spam that shouldn’t!) I’ll give it another week then try again.