Gavin Gamble’s e-petition to ban driven grouse shooting passed 10,000 signatures on Friday.
This, importantly, will trigger a response from Defra – a valuable insight into whether the government is still in denial about wildlife crime or whether the message is getting through.
Here are the leading constituencies so far – many of them are old friends (all with 50+ signatures):
- Inverness, Badenoch and Strathspey, Drew Hendry MP, 81 signatures
- Calder Valley, Craig Whittaker, 63 signatures
- Ross, Skye and Lochaber, Ian Blackford MP, 62 signatures
- Skipton and Ripon, Julian Smith MP, 62 signatures
- Thirsk and Malton, Kevin Hollinrake MP, 61 signatures
- Sheffield Hallam, Jared O’Mara, 60 signatures
- Dumfries and Galloway, Alister Jack MP, 59 signatures
- Isle of Wight, Bob Seeley MP, 51 signatures
All but the last of these just happen to be constituencies from grouse shooting areas.
If you know someone living in Barking, please give them a call – it’s still the only English, Scottish or Welsh constituency without a signature.
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Great news !
Just incidentally, is there any way of checking how many signatures there are from British citizens overseas ? As far I can see, the only requirement for signatories is to be UK resident OR a citizen, so signatures from overseas ought to be counted… yet I can only see figures available for UK constituencies.
Louise – you can find out. At the bottom of the petition page is ‘Get petition data (json format)’ – click on there and you get it (in a slightly awkward format!).
Thanks Mark 🙂 it’s reassuring to know that these have been counted too !
Lets hope we get a proper response from the dreadful Dr Coffey rather than the drivel she came out with at the time of the last petition debate.
There are still those out there who think some birds of prey are a problem rather than part of the ecology as a whole( a beautiful). I was taking part in a public ringing demo yesterday at RHS Harlow Carr ( timed as always to coincide with a half term weekend) A gentleman of about my age late sixties or early seventies asked what I thought of introduced Red Kites. I said they were brilliant, he said they were a problem because he had seen 3 raid a birds nest and in one area in the Chilterns was now devoid of songbirds because of kites. I politely used all the usual arguments about the ecology of the predated being designed to cope with predation and that Kites are hardly major songbird predators so if there has been a decline in the area he quoted it was probably down to something else. I don’t think he was convinced and couldn’t get beyond the concept of a failed nest. These are the people the tosh from the game lobby convinces and the ones we need to convince otherwise.
The children loved the ringing and being up close to birds. They may not remember what was said but birds in the hand will be remembered I’m sure for a very long time!
The research has already been done:
‘Starling was third, with 20% overall, comprising only 8% of summer
records but 44% of those in winter. Two other groups, the pigeons and the thrushes, each gave 7% of all bird records from pellets. The pigeons included Domestic Pigeon, Stock Dove, and Woodpigeon, and some which were not identified; they totalled 8% of summer and 5% of winter records. Thrushes included Fieldfare, Mistle Thrush, and Blackbird; they yielded only 4% of breeding-season records but 12% of those in winter, nearly all Fieldfares. Pipits gave 2% of summer birds, none in winter.’
‘From all the sources, seven species were added to the 1973 list:
Kestrel, Black Grouse, Golden Plover, Lesser Black-backed Gull, Cuckoo, Robin, and
Wheatear. All were full-grown except the Golden Plover, which was a half-grown chick.
Relatively few of the birds are thought to derive from carrion’
‘…..the Red Kite can show a surprising turn of speed over short distances, while in pursuit. Many bird preys were juveniles recently fledged, though adult birds up to the size of Rook or Crow may be taken freely. The unfledged young of nidifugous birds, such as gulls or waders, are often caught by Red Kites…’
The food of the red kite in Wales
Here we go again – more cherry-picked drivel from Tim Bidie! “the research has already been done” – what a joke. The research you quote is, I think, taken from Davis & Davis, 1981, which gives absolutely no information on whether predation by Red Kites has or has not had any impact on songbird numbers. It does show that Red Kites can catch and eat birds, but that is a totally different thing.
Let me give you an example. In Wytham Woods, near Oxford, about half of all young Blue Tits are taken by Sparrowhawks within a week of fledging from the nest. This would lead the Tim Bidie’s of this world to conclude that Blue Tit numbers must be in steep decline. But in fact Blue Tit numbers are actually increasing in Wytham Woods, as they are in the rest of the country. The fact that a species falls prey to another species does not mean that its numbers must fall; in fact the opposite may be true.
To return to the Red Kite study that TB quoted from, the preferred avian prey taken by Red Kites were corvids, pigeons and gulls, yet corvid and pigeon populations have increased markedly over the last 40 years despite the increases in Red Kites.
My main conclusion is that one should never take anything that TB (or most other people associated with the shooting industry) say at face value.
An interestingly defensive response.
The evidence that I provided was in respect of the comment:
‘Kites are hardly major songbird predators…..’
The paper I reference gives results of research over the uplands of Wales 1964-71 and 1975-79
I leave it to others to decide for themselves whether the results might indicate that concentrations of red kites now routinely sighted, often being hand fed, in England may contribute (in conjunction with increased populations of other raptors) to local and national declines in certain songbird populations.
‘Amongst the seven species in which there were significant negative effects of particular predators, the relationships that are most worthy of further investigation are associations between the increase in the number of Sparrowhawks during the period 1967- 2000 and declines in the abundances of Bullfinches, Tree Sparrows and Reed Buntings.’
BTO
Well….tree sparrows declining on account of an increase in sparrowhawks…who would have thought it?
A lovely lady I knew who was in no way connected to huntin, fishin, shootin (she was a member of a transition group and her local allotment society) highly intelligent and educated started spitting feathers when I mentioned the RSPB – ‘what annoys me is the way we are losing our garden birds because they are sticking up for these birds of prey’. This is what she had ‘learned’ from certain organisations and had swallowed it hook, line and sinker. I wasn’t aggressive or abusive in my reply, but certainly forth right and left her in no doubt that blindly accepting anything like that at face value was not clever, but was good for those with a hidden agenda who spout lies and propaganda. It was pointed out that no animal can prosper whilst diminishing its food supply, BOPs and their prey have co-existed for millions of years, due to brood sizes many of the birds eaten would have died from starvation instead and that there are game shooting interests who want rid of raptors because they think they’ll then be able to kill even more birds for fun – a pretty disgusting attempt to twist the public’s concern for wildlife into an anti conservation/ecology stance for their ludicrous hobby. Glad to say it worked, also helped by her being given a copy of a RSPB report on raptors on their ecological value and persecution at a later date. Now she’s narked with the people who tried to con her. Any and all lies emanating from the opposition need to be dumped on with a ton of bricks as soon as they appear, they do a lot of damage and they know it, it’s frightening how people can so easily be whipped into a froth of righteous indignation and ‘vigilante’ action about something like ivy for god’s sake.
I’m sure Mark has done an analysis of the tactics and events that contributed to the various ‘surges’ in signatures at different times during the last petition, and will pass the information on to GG. So far no mention of this petition on the LACS website, and I couldn’t find it on Chris Packham’s site, both of which may have been important previously.
It’s too late to worry whether the new petition is a good idea or not. It’s happening and we should all try to make it a success. What’s Rainham like in March?
CP is restricted in his public statements at the moment, is he not (due to Autumnwatch)?
I’m tired and quite honestly weary of the constant complaining that songbirds are absent due to the activity of predators, either specifically or generally. Most of the time this hypothesis is obvious nonsense, and the complainer is just inventing their so-called facts due to a personal dislike (why?) of animals that eat other animals. Where genuine declines in songbird populations have taken place, the answer is usually anthropogenic, like over-use of pesticides, habitat loss or various agricultural changes which have occurred. Mr “Beefy”Botham is possibly the worst high profile public figure guilty of promoting these weird uninformed views, along with the shooting community’s imaginary belief that the root of the problem is lack of predator control. They’re obsessed with it, and their latest ‘victory’ is to convince Government scientists that increased persecution of predators is the way forward to “save the Curlews.” Anything rather than admit man’s over-exploitation of the land has anything to do with the species decline.