My recent ancestors served the Crown in India for very nearly a century: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2298621/pdf/brmedj07272-0051b.pdf
I wrote a blog here in 2015 (The Good Intentions Paving Company, 14 January 2015) which received quite a lot of comments including two blogs in respopnse (here and here).
First of all, a warm thank you to Dr Avery for continuing to publish contrary opinions to provide balance to this blog.
So, continuing from where I left off, what exactly is going on: petitions, and yet more petitions, to ban or licence grouse shooting; why?
The variety and number of birds of prey in Britain is on the up every year with ebbs and flows for individual species but the trend line for raptor populations in this country is firmly on an upward curve.
This trend is inverted, generally, in upland areas, but across the piece, not just in areas managed for grouse shooting, so most likely to be as a consequence of changes in habitat and a shortage of prey species. Illegal killing takes place but the few (roundly and rightly condemned on all sides) incidents do not affect the general improving population trend line.
Last year’s figures show no prosecutions at all for the illegal killing of raptors in 2016.
There are myriad other contributory factors to this upland story: CCTV imagery of foxes killing raptors, raptors attacking other raptors. I came across a red kite eating a kestrel only yesterday. This is borne out by studies into the diet of red kites. CCTV imagery shows buzzards well capable of taking waders on the wing, and, no doubt, other raptors as well. Peregrines will kill buzzards close to nest sites. White tailed sea eagles may well be predating young golden eagles. Increased wind turbine activity undoubtedly also plays its part.
Young raptors can, typically, suffer up to 80% mortality rate in their first year. The first year is, of course, when tagging occurs. A high recorded mortality rate for tagged birds follows, as night follows day. As the Natural England report points out, if a tagged bird’s final position is in long vegetation, on its back, it goes into the ‘missing, fate unknown’ category. Harnessing a 9.5 gram transmitter to a young bird seems unlikely to have zero effect on its life chances.
Proponents of a shooting ban claim several reasons in support: animal welfare problems, nature conservation problems, wider environmental problems, wildlife crime problems and problems of social inequity. On closer investigation, these broad claims, with regard to grouse shooting, reduce to : culling, heather burning and crime. Man made landscapes, where man has removed apex predators, require wildlife management, all over the world. Controlled heather burning, where man has replaced wildfires, follows a similar logic. You will have heather burning, one way or another, in perpetuity; controlled burning is, clearly, the lesser of two evils. Incidentally, the authors of the report often used to support environmental, social equity, problems from heather burning have roundly condemned the ‘sensationalist and/or partisan manner’ in which their research has been presented in ‘various outlets’. You will have crime in perpetuity also, but severe penalties and energetic enforcement reduced prosecutions for the illegal killing of raptors to zero in 2016.
But no amount of evidence appears to make any difference to the stance of this blog which continues to call for draconian sanctions against game shooting.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JQYtj8Uwybs
To the outsider, a stance involving blind faith, bereft of evidence, appears more like some form of religion than anything else, and the seventh most popular religion in this country is ‘Jedi’
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zTL4T_NVGhY
But is opposition to game shooting a religious belief, really? Or is something else going on?
Reference to the most recent similar occurrence, the campaign against hunting, gives a clue.
No peer reviewed evidence was presented to support the notion that hunting was cruel; in fact an expensive government report was produced, whose author noted that the report could not state that hunting was cruel.
But still the campaign went ahead, the ‘most illiberal act of the last century’ (Roy Jenkins, Labour and SDP MP) was forced through parliament by a wholly inappropriate use of the parliament act, designed for something else entirely. And the Prime Minister whose government forced it through cried crocodile tears, admitting it to have been a mistake; some mistake, with thousands of lambs, piglets, slaughtered by rogue foxes every year, thousands of shot and wounded foxes every year left to die hideous prolonged deaths underground, unrecovered as a direct consequence of the two dog (useless in thick cover) follow up limit imposed by the barbaric and incompetent hunting act; an animal welfare catastrophe. Bad law brings the law into disrepute.
And a ban on grouse shooting will have similar deleterious consequences. Changing land use in Ireland, no game shooting revenue so increasing afforestation, for commercial reasons, is reducing hen harrier habitat and numbers. The hen harrier first year mortality rate in Ireland, no driven grouse shooting, is 72%. In this country, foxes have already destroyed at least one clutch of young hen harriers at Langholm since game keeping ceased, again, in 2016. A previous cessation of game keeping at the same location in 1996 was followed by a precipitate decline in ground nesting birds including hen harriers. Without game keeping on the uplands, the consequences are clear, evidenced. But still the campaign against shooting continues.
So why is this happening? The anti hunting campaign makes the answer all too clear:
“This is a dispute we must win, having long ago ceased to be about the fate of a few thousand deer and foxes. It’s about who governs us. Us or them?”
Chris Mullin, former Labour MP for Sunderland South – A View from the Foothills (2009)
“This has nothing to do with animal welfare – this is for the miners”
Dennis Skinner MP, Labour Party Conference – September 2004
“Now that hunting has been banned, we ought at last to own up to it: the struggle over that Bill was not just about animal welfare and personal freedom, it was class war.”
Peter Bradley, former Labour MP for The Wrekin, Sunday Telegraph – 21stNovember 2004
“There is not absolute proof that wounded foxes suffer…”
Jackie Ballard, former Director General RSPCA, Letter – 9th May 2005
So game shooting will stand or fall simply as a consequence of what kind of government is in power on any given day: liberal or illiberal? Evidence be damned.
“To the outsider, a stance involving blind faith, bereft of evidence, appears more like some form of religion than anything else, and the seventh most popular religion in this country is ‘Jedi’”
Sums up the shooting lobby fairly concisely.
Thanks for publishing this. Of all the blog pieces on grouse shooting and the need for regulation this is by far the most powerful and effective.
Thank you Ian, that is the best use of sarcasm that I’ve seen for a long time.
It is possible that you believe what you have written here, Mr Bidie, but if so it is you who is adopting a position of blind faith not those who object to the environmental harm done in the name of grouse shooting.
You try to downplay the role of criminal persecution in the precarious situation of Hen Harriers in England by suggesting that incidents are few and “condemned on all sides” but there is a wealth of evidence that it is rife, notwithstanding the difficulty of catching the perpetrators red-handed (your suggestion that the lack of successful prosecutions is an indication of an absence of crime is sadly ludicrous). Indeed, the high levels of wildlife crime are implicitly acknowledged by the leaders of the shooting industry through their insistence on the inclusion of “brood management” in the Hen Harrier recovery action plan: no-one believes that the harriers cannot raise their own young perfectly successfully on their own and the only way in which this measure can possibly contribute to the species’ conservation is if the removal of chicks from the moor to be reared elsewhere is accepted by the shooting managers as a quid pro quo for not shooting the birds. Many of us would prefer not to reward criminals in this way and would simply demand and expect the law to be upheld.
I don’t believe it is possible that Mr Bidie can believe what he has written. If he was @Monrover on the Guardian, which seems almost certain given his almost identical arguments placed here under a similar username, I have engaged extensively with his supposedly mistaken beliefs. What Mr Bidie demonstrated was that he was a knowledgeable and intelligent person who knew exactly what I and others were saying, engaging in ever more convoluted argument.
Take a simple example. Yet again Mr Bidie dishonestly tries to pretend that this is a campaign to “ban shooting” something he states multiple times in different forms. Yet in fact it is a campaign to ban only one type of shooting, “driven grouse shooting” as it is predicated on the illegal persecution of raptors – not even a campaign to ban all grouse shooting. Mr Bidie has repeatedly made known that he is an experienced shooter. Therefore Mr Bidie knows darn well the difference between “driven shooting” and “walking up”. Yet for the purpose of false arguments he pretends not to know the difference between “driven shooting”, and “walking up”, so he can pretend to mistakenly believe that Mark Avery, Chris Packham are campaigning to ban all forms of shooting, or all game shooting. It is not possible for someone can be so well informed, to be so intelligent, but to be completely unaware of such a simple fundamental error in the premises of their argument. This error has been repeatedly pointed out to him.
Yes, Monrover at the Guardian online and Monro on the Telegraph and Mail online. Very tiresome.
Tim, it is always interesting to read counter views but I think you have been too generalist in your comments to be taken seriously. An example is heather burning. Burning, cutting and grazing are OK interventions to prevent dry heath becoming woodland – the debate there is around what level of intensity of intervention is required. Burning of heather on blanket bog/deep peat, has well documented, unintended negative consequences for the environment. Blanket bog is also a climax habitat and all things being equal, does not require intervention to be maintained. The debate then is around whether causing environmental damage in the process of burning of vegetation for grouse management is acceptable.
Wildfire is an important subject. In some parts of the world, plant species are fire adapted. In the UK, I support the view that there are no fire-adapted plant species but some plants e.g. heather, are fire tolerant (to an extent). In the UK, wildfire is rarely if ever, a spontaneous natural event. We do not have the right weather systems at the right times of year for things like lightning to be the problem it is in other parts of the world. In the UK, wildfire is about people and preventing wildfires requires that to be recognised and acted upon appropriately.
Such blithe disregard for what happens every year in The Irish Republic, a glimpse into the future for our uplands without private funding to prevent it; a great many more upland fires, visible from space, helpful for so many commentators here.
https://www.nasa.gov/image-feature/goddard/2017/irelands-gorse-wildfires-creating-havoc-0
Did you read the article you linked to, Tim? I did. You seem to be suggesting, by linking to it, that without management, uplands will be exposed to huge numbers of large, naturally-starting fires. But the article states that there were “511 gorse fires of which 466 were started deliberately” (n.b. these were in Northern Ireland, not the ROI, though the article does cover both). It also states that those were mostly started to clear vegetation (sound familiar?). It strikes me that if this is such a severe issue, the people who manage uplands could just stop setting fire to things during heatwaves…
‘Achieving ecological management objectives will require a range of tools, which, depending on the local circumstances, may include burning.’
The peatland vegetation burning debate: keep scientific critique in perspective. A response to Brown et al. and Douglas et al.
A “RANGE” of tools, ie not exclusively burning the bog, which is standard driven grouse moor practice.
Such evidence as exists on burning is either inconclusive or against you.
1) Peat formation – as well as negative impact there is also evidence that burning heather has a positive impact on the Sphagnum mosses that are important in peat formation. A summary of research “found no evidence to suggest that prescribed burning was deleterious to the abundance of peat-forming species; indeed, it was found to favour them”.
2) Dissolved Organic Carbons (DOC) – There is also some evidence that DOC levels are unaffected or decline where burning has taken place.
3) Water table – the EMBER study suggests heather burning lowers the water table, others suggest it does the opposite.
4) Scale of burning – some authors express concern that more burning, rather than less, should be occurring, to reduce potential fuel build-up and wildfire risk. Recent evidence from the Peak District shows that burning is generally carried out in accordance with guidelines, with appropriately sized burns and only 0.9% area being burnt per year, well below the recommended 10%.
5) Carbon budgets – a Natural England evidence review assessed that the evidence for overall carbon budgets is limited and contradictory.
6) Flooding – a Government committee report does not implicate increased burning in increased flood risk.
The EMBER study also suggests overland flow is less common on burnt peat than unburnt peat. For the lowest 80% of rainfall events, the lag period is greater on burnt areas, and there is no difference for the top 20% (heaviest storms). For the top 20% of storms, the hydrograph intensity is higher for burnt areas but the lag time is not affected. This means that the peak discharge (amount of water in the stream), is higher for these heavy storms, but it does not happen faster.
So there are a range of studies. Could you supply the relevant references please?
Who the hell are you trying to kid?
And excellent piece, sir, and one that I agree with in almost its entirity.
I should also note that I while disagree with much of what Dr Avery writes, I thank him for publishing this piece on his website.
Very well written, you have spoken on behalf of sensibility.
Robert – really? No sense but some sensibility?
Credit to Tim for at least attempting to engage and debate the issues. However, he makes some bizarre points. Alistair has already dealt with the heather-burning issue and I agree entirely with him.
“I came across a red kite eating a kestrel only yesterday. This is borne out by studies into the diet of red kites.”
It’s very well-known that red kites are principally scavengers. When they do hunt, their mode of doing so hardly seems conducive to capturing a kestrel. I put it to Tim that his red kite came across a dead kestrel and took advantage. Who knows – perhaps (like the vultures in yesterday’s blog) it ingested some lead whilst doing so!
“severe penalties and energetic enforcement reduced prosecutions for the illegal killing of raptors to zero in 2016.”
Were that the case, would Tim not agree that the number of documented cases of illegal killing should also have fallen to zero? Yet there were 81 confirmed incidents in 2016. It seems rather more likely that the lack of prosecutions came from the difficulty of gathering substantial evidence in remote locations when faced with a wall of silence from the grouse-shooting set, combined a lack of willingness to prosecute. Even when the killing of a hen harrier was caught on video, the case still didn’t go to trial, on what seemed to be a technicality. That hardly supports Tim’s statement.
Of course, if you ask Tim to cite ‘studies’ demonstrating that red kites eat kestrels he’ll remain silent.
Last week after the snow, there were dead birds everywhere.
Confirmed by whom, I wonder? Even the rspb does not stand behind the ‘birdcrime’ figures that it publishes.
There are strict guidelines on what kind of evidence (including how it is gathered) is accepted in court.
I yield to no-one in my contempt for the criminals who kill protected species illegally.
But protections like the fundamental principle of English Law, innocent until proven guilty, are there for the protection of all of us.
If the illegal killing of raptors is as widespread as many maintain, it seems inconceivable to any open minded citizen that there could have been no successful prosecutions at all in 2016.
“But protections like the fundamental principle of English Law, innocent until proven guilty, are there for the protection of all of us.”
Yes indeed, but the fact that it has not been possible to prove that a particular individual is guilty of a crime does not mean that a crime did not occur as I am sure you understand. There have been cases where gamekeepers have been filmed in the act of various raptor persecution crimes and these have failed in the courts on technical legal issues. You can argue over whether or not the law was correctly applied in these cases but an open minded citizen such as you apparently aspire to be would not conclude that these crimes did not occur.
Many people nowadays receive frequent phone calls seeking to scam them out of their savings and some sadly fall for the tricks of these criminals. As far as I know the perpetrators are rarely if ever apprehended so according to your logic this s a crime that doesn’t happen – or does your logic only apply to raptor persecution and not to crime in general?
Spot on, Jonathan! Tim, you’re way off the mark here. You must be able to see that there are two levels of evidence – it is possible for there to be clear evidence of a crime occurring, without there being sufficient evidence of who committed it to secure a prosecution. In the many cases where there is that clear evidence of a crime having been committed (video evidence, an x-ray of a dead raptor revealing lead shot, etc.), there is only one thing more galling to me than the difficulty of establishing, beyond reasonable doubt, who committed that crime. That one thing is the perniciously-spread implication that a lack of prosecutions for such crimes is evidence for the lack of a problem.
You are missing the point.
It is inconceivable, if illegal killing of raptors was sufficiently widespread to threaten their survival, as is often alleged, that, given the intelligence and law enforcement resources available, there could be zero prosecutions in a calendar year, or that raptor numbers could be increasing substantially, year on year.
The evidence simply does not exist so much trumped up nonsense has to be trotted out instead
There is a word for that: charlatanism
No-one is missing the point, Tim. There are every clear reasons why a lack of prosecutions does not mean the crime is not happening. How many prosecutions were there in 2016 for telephone scamming? By your logic the lack of prosecutions means that the scamming did not occur or only at a trivial level. But of course your logic is deeply flawed; there is a great deal of crime, including serious crime, where the number of prosecutions is a very poor measure of the prevalence of the crime.
Raptors are not increasing year on year in the parts of the country where the persecution is occurring.
The fact that you cannot conceive of something has no bearing on whether or not it is true.
If particular crimes are occurring, prosecutions will eventually reflect that:
‘Huge phone scam targeting Americans leads to 700 being detained in India……Seventy workers have been formally arrested and around 630 others are being investigated,” Singh said. “We expect that many more people will be arrested.” The Guardian 06/10/2016
For wildlife crime, sanctions are severe and prosecution energetic, with technology making detection ever more likely.
Zero prosecutions for the illegal killing of raptors in 2016 is, consequently, telling.
The point is that discussion, without credible evidence, is just so much hot air…….and you have no credible peer reviewed evidence support your views.
As explained, you do not need peer reviewed evidence to support your opinions. Reviewers know this, but they assume that the readers are educated to an extent, thus they allow some speculation, usually in the introduction and conclusion of a paper. What reviewers cant guard against is someone taking opinion or speculation from a paper and citing this as evidence.
You really haven’t got a leg to stand on. For my part, I am now getting bored with this.
But you need peer reviewed science to support a change in the law (or for your opinions to be taken seriously, rather than written off as so much hot air.)
This really is feeble, trying to fudge the line between opinion and fact. FACT: to change the law you need to push a bill through Parliament.
The idea of banning something without credible, peer reviewed, supporting science has a name:
Totalitarianism.
Totalitarian democracy?
Tim, this is very silly indeed, you seem to have invented a infinite loop that makes all evidence, inadmissible to a peer reviewed process, because it isn’t peer reviewed. In case you fail to understand, parliament is peer review by your argument, therefore enactment of laws is valid.
It is the House of Commons that is peer reviewed.
Only misuse of the parliament act permits the commons to act in a totalitarian fashion.
Wot, more infinite regression?
“Misuse of Parliament Act?” = passing law not peer reviewed by you personally, now that is totalitarian a dictatorship.
The readers here can decide whose view on totalitarianism they prefer, yours, or that of Lord Steyn:
‘The logic of this proposition is that the procedure of the 1949 Act
could be used by the government to abolish the House of Lords.
Strict legalism suggests that the Attorney General may be right.
But I am deeply troubled about assenting to the validity of such an
exorbitant assertion of government power in our bi-cameral
system.’
file:///C:/Users/tim/Downloads/SN00675.pdf
Tim Your comments:
“Confirmed by whom, I wonder? Even the rspb does not stand behind the ‘birdcrime’ figures that it publishes.”
Talking of evidence, can you actually provide any to support this assertion? If not why are you making it?
“There are strict guidelines on what kind of evidence (including how it is gathered) is accepted in court.”
Yes, and we all agree that that is a good thing. No-one wants to see suspect gamekeepers beaten until they confess. Generally the gathering of evidence must comply with the laws of the land. Personally, I find forensic evidence by far the most interesting kind but would hate to see someone convicted because both samples had been contaminated by the forensic technicians own body parts. So yes it is vital that law gets it right.
“I yield to no-one in my contempt for the criminals who kill protected species illegally.”
Well there is an RSPB hotline, if you ever come across this 01767 680551.
“But protections like the fundamental principle of English Law, innocent until proven guilty, are there for the protection of all of us.”
Yes indeed. However where a persons life or liberty are not in the balance, for example if there is very good evidence of non compliance with licencing conditions and an estate receives a substantial plug from the tax payer, there should be the option of removing that subsidy or licence, if licencing came into being. Why is this so unreasonable, everyone else in the world has to demonstrate compliance to get their money, why not shooting estates?
“If the illegal killing of raptors is as widespread as many maintain, it seems inconceivable to any open minded citizen that there could have been no successful prosecutions at all in 2016.”
See Jonathan Wallace’s comments. The analogy of saying to a burglary victim, that if you don’t prosecute a burglar, it means you haven’t been burgled is very appropriate here.
‘the figures in Birdcrime may vary from other published reports, because data sets compiled for different purposes, using very different methods, are unlikely to be directly comparable. Consequently, there will be some variation in how incidents are recorded, assessed and categorised.’
‘The views expressed in Birdcrime are not necessarily those of the
RSPB or PAW.’
https://www.rspb.org.uk/globalassets/downloads/documents/positions/wild-birds-and-the-law/birdcrime-2014.pdf
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7FvoXJCrBhQ
On the other hand they published it.
A top tip: don’t believe everything that is published unless it is peer reviewed or references up to date peer reviewed sources.
Top Tip, there are medications available for many conditions causing short term memory loss.
Imitation……..etc etc
Thank you
A tip that you curiously fail to apply to yourself.
Also this is a classic example of the Bidie debating technique of always sliding off at a tangent when confronted by an argument. Gerard was addressing the question of whether or not the RSPB stands by its bird crime figures and as he reasonably points out the fact that they published them is clear evidence that they do – whether or not you personally find those figures credible.
The rspb ‘birdcrime’ figures are not peer reviewed therefore not credible as evidence. Peer reviewing exists for a reason.
Tim – murder cases aren’t peer-reviewed either! You are funny!
Murder cases are peer reviewed; trial by jury.
As usual you go twisting off at an angle in the hope of muddying the waters. You know perfectly well that ‘peer review’ in the scientific sense does not mean twelve randomly selected members of the public consider the evidence but appropriately qualified and competent fellow scientists. It’s a process that is useful for ensuring that published scientific results are based on sound experimental techniques and analysis but it is not the only way of testing the veracity of information or appropriate for every sort of claim.
For example see: https://raptorpersecutionscotland.wordpress.com/2017/03/24/41-eagles-10-years-0-prosecutions/ It is a list of incidents involving the illegal killing of golden eagles. It is not a scientific paper so peer review is not applicable (what exactly would they review?) but in no sense does that make it unreliable. In many instances the body of the eagle was recovered and post mortems revealed that they had been shot or poisoned. These cases are a matter of public record and if you deny their occurrence you are accusing a large and disparate number of people of being liars. There were no prosecutions but the evidence is clearly there to show that birds of prey – in this case eagles – are subject to an ongoing attrition.
I am pretty sure that a jury of randomly selected members of the public, if given the opportunity to hear all the evidence of raptor persecution, would agree that there is definitely a problem and that it is centred around the grouse shooting estates.
The peer review process, as with trial by jury, exists for a reason. Both rely on the exactly the same principle of English Law dating back to Magna Carta. This is a good thing
It is why the rspb cannot stand behind the views expressed in ‘Birdcrime’ and why parliament, without any credible peer reviewed evidence presented to the contrary, unsurprisingly stands by driven grouse shooting.
“The rspb ‘birdcrime’ figures are not peer reviewed therefore not credible as evidence. Peer reviewing exists for a reason.”
So is a witness statement from a defendant not admissible as evidence, because it isn’t peer reviewed.
Yes and the most important one being that the same stuff doesn’t get published over and over again, which rubbishes you argument about old sources.
“Murder cases are peer reviewed; trial by jury.”
A jury consisting entirely of criminals would be a more appropriate description of the peer review process. To get your paper passed, you send it to a journal, who send it to reviewers, who are other workers in the field. So the analogy is weak.
You accuse others of not being able to see what is staring them in the face but in fact that describes you perfectly.
If a succession of dead people were found with knives sticking out of their backs normal people would be worried about a dangerous killer on the loose but in “Bidie-world” there would be “nothing to see here” until a peer reviewed article had appeared in Nature to confirm it.
Likewise a succession of dead eagles with lead shot or poison in their bodies, confirmed by autopsies, is evidence to most people that there is a problem with raptor persecution but you just can’t bring yourself to acknowledge it but instead indulge in ever more fanciful contortions to wave it away.
Ah well, I daresay Bingo thinks you’re a clever chap.
That is precisely why peer review, trial by jury exists, why the concept was placed in Magna Carta, so that organisations like the rspb cannot simply commission papers written by their members, using data gathered by their members in support of their campaigns, present these as ‘evidence’ and expect to be taken seriously.
As a further example, if a statement like this, below, was presented as evidence in court, ambulances would have to be called to take away the numbers of people injured from rolling around the floor holding their sides.
‘Of 131 young eagles tracked, as many as 41 (31%) have disappeared (presumably died) under suspicious circumstances significantly connected with contemporaneous records of illegal persecution.’
http://www.snh.org.uk/pdfs/publications/commissioned_reports/982.pdf
Raptors suffer up to 80% first year mortality, hen harriers in Ireland first year mortality 72%
It will be interesting to see what use the snp make of this paper. They are exactly the kind of government that you will need in England to ban grouse shooting here, illiberal and incompetent, motivated by class war.
I think the only thing that would have the court laughing (with exasperation would be your continual insistence on never answering a straight question but always squirming off in another direction with more smoke and mirrors. You just can’t bring yourself to acknowledge the bodies can you?
Your references to Magna Carta are absurd.
Cross examiner: “Mr Bidie, would you acknowledge that the fact that the deceased was found with a knife in his back is strongly suggestive of him having been stabbed?”
Mr Bidie: “No, I would not”
Cross examiner: “Oh? Why not?”
Mr Bidie: “The evidence has not been peer reviewed and therefore has no value. Have you seen this clip from a Monty Python film which shows that I am intellectually superior to everyone else in this courtroom?”
Cross examiner: “Please keep to the point Mr Bidie”
Mr Bidie: “I saw a Red Kite eating a Kestrel once”
Cross examiner: “Mr Bidie that has nothing to do with the question in hand. Please stick to the point.”
Mr Bidie: “This parrot is not dead”.
And so on ad nauseam.
Yes, to avoid running into this simplistic argument in the future, I will quote directly from “the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection,” by Charles Darwin:
“As many more individuals of each species are born than can possibly survive; and as, consequently, there is a frequently recurring struggle for existence, it follows that any being, if it vary however slightly in any manner profitable to itself, under the complex and sometimes varying conditions of life, will have a better chance of surviving, and thus be naturally selected.”
In addition to Natural mortality rates, Hen Harriers in England are subject to an additional up to 75 % of them being harvested by gamekeepers, to protect Red Grouse stocks.
Always delighted to admit when I am wrong, the peer review system and trial by jury, in fact dates back to 1215, Pope innocent III:
‘In November 1215, Pope Innocent III, perhaps concerned that wrongful convictions were destroying faith in divine providence, forbade clerical participation, and so ‘trial by ordeal’ lost its point. It was replaced by a method of fact-finding used in land disputes and by coroners…….’
Geoffrey Robertson QC
P.S. I’m glad that you enjoyed the Monty Python clip. Here’s one of a few gentlemen similarly unconcerned regarding the importance of peer review:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=itRbwbVTrzw
Regarding the illegal killing of raptors, gamekeepers, along with many other conservation groups, are actively involved in stamping it out:
Raptor persecution maps were developed by the Raptor Persecution Priority Delivery Group, which includes Defra, the Devolved Administrations, Natural England, National Wildlife Crime Unit, the police, British Association for Shooting and Conservation, RSPB, Country Land and Business Association, Moorland Association, National Game Keepers’ Organisation, National Parks England, Crown Prosecution Service and the Countryside Alliance.
The maps will be a significant intelligence tool to support the enforcement of wildlife law. They will help the police and the Raptor Persecution Priority Delivery Group gain a better understanding of where the problem areas are and subsequently target these crime hot spots with increased levels of enforcement, engagement and prevention activity.
“‘In November 1215, Pope Innocent III, perhaps concerned that wrongful convictions were destroying faith in divine providence, forbade clerical participation, and so ‘trial by ordeal’ lost its point. It was replaced by a method of fact-finding used in land disputes and by coroners…….’
Geoffrey Robertson QC”
Is that peer reviewed?
Cross examiner: “Mr Bidie, how do you explain the fact that this eagle is full of bediocarb?”
Mr Bidie: “Pope Innocent the third forbade clerical participation…”
Cross examiner: “MR BIDIE! Please stick to the point”
Mr Bidie: “Not much of a cheese shop really is it?”
Jonathan – reading all of the previous was just about worth it for that comment alone! Thank you.
“Regarding the illegal killing of raptors, gamekeepers, along with many other conservation groups, are actively involved in stamping it out:”
Some maybe, however upon their own admission, intensively managed moor organisations freely admit “if we let the hen harrier in, we will soon have nothing else!”- Amanda Anderson the Moorland Association (https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/battery-farm-to-bring-hen-harriers-back-from-the-brink-lw77qcs5t)
“Raptor persecution maps were developed by the Raptor Persecution Priority Delivery Group, which includes Defra, the Devolved Administrations, Natural England, National Wildlife Crime Unit, the police, British Association for Shooting and Conservation, RSPB, Country Land and Business Association, Moorland Association, National Game Keepers’ Organisation, National Parks England, Crown Prosecution Service and the Countryside Alliance.
The maps will be a significant intelligence tool to support the enforcement of wildlife law. They will help the police and the Raptor Persecution Priority Delivery Group gain a better understanding of where the problem areas are and subsequently target these crime hot spots with increased levels of enforcement, engagement and prevention activity.”
Tee Hee! Does that fit with your “recent” evidence dogma?
Yes.
‘Trial by jury is the most venerated and venerable institution of Anglo-American law. Although it dates from 1215, it did not come about as a result of Magna Carta, but rather as the consequence of an order by Pope Innocent III (1161–1216). However, Magna Carta’s iconic reference to ‘the lawful judgment of his peers’ as a precondition for loss of liberty has helped in later centuries to entrench the right to jury trial in our pantheon of liberties.’
The order of Pope Innocent III, signed by the Pope and the cardinals who reviewed it, can be viewed at the vatican library in Rome.
Magna Carta was signed by the peerage and the original, with signatures of the peers who reviewed it, can be viewed at the British Library
Yes but your argument is essentially that all evidence to peer reviewed process should be peer reviewed before it gets there. Which is silly, because reviewers can make their own judgements about the value of the evidence, that is what the review is about.
You are correct. References cited in peer reviewed works are checked for accuracy, adequacy and balance. That is one of the reasons why the peer review process is so important and one of the reasons why any non peer reviewed work submitted in support of an argument is immediately suspect.
So, what are you supposed to do with raw data? The absurdity of your statements on this are obvious when applied to scientific publishing. According to your logic, no progress in science publishing is possible because non-peer reviewed data would be inadmissible. Therefore any scientific experiment that generates new data and just about every scientific paper ever published, because to get published a scientific paper has to generate new data, would be invalid. Your argument is a logical absurdity.
You are tying yourself in knots. Uncritical acceptance of data, without considering how it has been gathered, its reliability, is the mark of a dupe.
Clearly raw data, primary sources, do, however, provide evidence for critical comment, interpretation. The peer review process ensures a degree of balance in that critical process.
Unfortunately for you, the rspb, right at the beginning of the ‘birdcrime’ document, clearly disassociates itself from all the comment and interpretation contained in that document, as I show above.
It does so because, as it says, and I show, above, the data given is based on entirely different terms of reference to data gathered by any other organisation in regard to the same subject and is not independently verified.
You may very well be happy for the rspb to provide all the witnesses and jury from its own membership, in a trial of its own devising.
But open minded individuals will never accept what is quite clearly a piece of partisan propaganda over independently gathered and verified data assessed in a properly and impartially peer reviewed paper.
Most particularly they will not accept that kind of thing when even the rspb, tellingly, states in its own paper that it is unwilling, itself, to act as judge.
Tim – that sounds very much like the impossibly tangled mess of twine calling the perfectly furled rope knotted, to me.
“You are tying yourself in knots. Uncritical acceptance of data, without considering how it has been gathered, its reliability, is the mark of a dupe.”
Indeed, however most scientific publications supply detailed descriptions of the methods used to gather the evidence. And if you are capable, you can perform the same procedures and get the same results, in most cases. I should know, I have done this hundreds of times.
I think it is you, that uncritically cherry-picks the opinions of the authors of published materials and misrepresents these as evidence, where they are not evidence, they are opinions.
“Clearly raw data, primary sources, do, however, provide evidence for critical comment, interpretation. The peer review process ensures a degree of balance in that critical process.”
Well I have read some extraordinary claims and arguments in some scientific papers. Of course the educated reader knows that this is speculation and often linked to grant applications. In some journals this speculation is actually encouraged, because it helps to sell the material to a wider audience. Also, as mentioned elsewhere
“Unfortunately for you, the rspb, right at the beginning of the ‘birdcrime’ document, clearly disassociates itself from all the comment and interpretation contained in that document, as I show above.”
Why unfortunately for me? I have not used any information whatsoever from any RSPB Birdcrime report in what I have written. The only information I have used so far is from Natural England’s own spreadsheet on the fate of satellite tagged Hen Harriers. I will rectify this here: a whopping 70 % of people convicted of birdcrimes between 1990 and 2009 (141 people in total), were involved in game birds (98 people), (RSPB Birdcrime 2009).
“It does so because, as it says, and I show, above, the data given is based on entirely different terms of reference to data gathered by any other organisation in regard to the same subject and is not independently verified.”
And if you cared you could check how the data was gathered etc for yourself. Let’s look at SNH Commissioned Report 982, “Analysis of the fates of sattelite tracked Golden Eagles in Scotland.” The methods used here are quite clearly described and you can read it for yourself, if you so wish. It clearly shows that illegal persecution is having an impact on the Golden Eagle population and that much of this illegal persecution is associated with grouse moors.
“You may very well be happy for the rspb to provide all the witnesses and jury from its own membership, in a trial of its own devising.”
No I am not. The RSPB are perfectly entitled to produce materials which I may or may not read and use in forming my opinions. In my arguments I have used very little of what the RSPB have published.
“But open minded individuals will never accept what is quite clearly a piece of partisan propaganda over independently gathered and verified data assessed in a properly and impartially peer reviewed paper. Most particularly they will not accept that kind of thing when even the rspb, tellingly, states in its own paper that it is unwilling, itself, to act as judge.”
Clearly the prerequisite to “open mindedness” is agreement with you. Absurd.
The ‘birdcrime’ ‘incident’ figures do not rely on tracking data, do they.
They rely on data collected by rspb members, ‘the witnesses’, commented on by rspb members, ‘the jury’, from whose opinions the rspb explicitly disassociates itself right at the beginning of the document.
If ‘birdcrime’ did rely on tracking data, it would have to state that illegal killing of tagged hen harriers over a 15 year period amounted to a tiny proportion, less than 0.15 of a percent, of all tagged birds annually.
But if it relied on data from postmortems, it would have to state that none of the postmortems could definitively state that any of the hen harriers had been illegally killed by shooting.
If it relied on independent data from the courts, it would have to state that there were zero prosecutions for the illegal killing of raptors in 2016…….oh, it did state that……. but then ‘birdcrime’ suggested this was due to a lack of energy by the authorities in pursuing possible cases of illegal killing…….oh, but hadn’t the rspb already stated: ”The views expressed in birdcrime are not necessarily those of the
rspb or paw.’
The point is that there is precious little, if any, data conclusively showing the illegal killing of hen harriers and none whatsoever that conclusively links it to driven grouse shooting.
That is why the last parliamentary debate dismissed any idea of any change in the law.
And that is why there is insufficient support today for the idea of banning driven grouse shooting to even get enough signatures to generate another debate.
As for SNH report 982, well it’s deja vu all over again, isn’t it.
‘The views expressed by the author(s) of this report should not be
taken as the views and policies of Scottish Natural Heritage.’
‘References:
…… RSPB. 2015. The Illegal Killing of Birds of Prey in Scotland 1994 – 2014: a Review. RSPB Scotland, Edinburgh.’
SNH report 982
What about a second opinon, from someone with over 40 years experience of Scottish eagles, from somewhere that has no driven grouse shooting?
‘When he settled in Scotland in the mid-1970s he was converted to a conservation outlook and has devoted his time since to monitoring our local Golden Eagles. Over the years John has seen a slow decline in our local population, with the survey this year showing 5 ranges which he once had occupied now to be vacant. Why? We can’t know for sure and it’s probably a mix of factors rather than a sole cause, with these possibly including increased human disturbance, a declining food supply and habitat degradation. Climate change may be an issue too, with our weather being variable and extreme over recent winters and springs; with some fine spells but unsettled times too, which could be impacting eagle prey. John himself wonders whether atmospheric pollution has been a cause, with Europe’s industrial emissions being dumped down within our upland’s high rainfall over decades, perhaps augmented by Chernobyl – he noticed big declines in many species from the mid-1980s onwards. Our declining eagle population will come as no surprise to many who head to our local hills, with many folk of John’s generation noting how scarce many of our bird species have become compared to decades ago. (A local decline in Peregrines highlighted by the 2014 national survey reflects this too.)’
Also, in a spirit of helpfulness, here’s another top tip, not from me but from a raptor fieldworker of over 15 years experience:
‘…. By not visiting nests perhaps trails were not left which foxes might follow.’
Birding guide to the Isle of Skye
“The ‘birdcrime’ ‘incident’ figures do not rely on tracking data, do they. They rely on data collected by rspb members, ‘the witnesses’, commented on by rspb members, ‘the jury’, from whose opinions the rspb explicitly disassociates itself right at the beginning of the document. If ‘birdcrime’ did rely on tracking data, it would have to state that illegal killing of tagged hen harriers over a 15 year period amounted to a tiny proportion, less than 0.15 of a percent, of all tagged birds annually.”
Cherry picking numbers again to produce 0.15% is nonsense. So I will continue in your vein: of the recovered satellite tagged dead Hen Harriers, a staggering 33% have been illegally persecuted. Add to these the ones that the person who persecuted the bird, didn’t want the bird or the tag found, so “disposed” of them, which would be the common sense thing to do, it doesn’t look so rosy, does it (making the estimate somewhere between 25% and 75% of all tagged birds)?
“But if it relied on data from postmortems, it would have to state that none of the postmortems could definitively state that any of the hen harriers had been illegally killed by shooting. If it relied on independent data from the courts, it would have to state that there were zero prosecutions for the illegal killing of raptors in 2016…….oh, it did state that……. but then ‘birdcrime’ suggested this was due to a lack of energy by the authorities in pursuing possible cases of illegal killing…….oh, but hadn’t the rspb already stated: ”The views expressed in birdcrime are not necessarily those of the rspb or paw.’ The point is that there is precious little, if any, data conclusively showing the illegal killing of hen harriers and none whatsoever that conclusively links it to driven grouse shooting.”
More cherry picking little bits of information and trying to string them together into a 1 dimensional argument. We are dealing with complex systems. If I shoot you and then push you into a pool of large, hungry crocodiles, by your logic I would have played no part in your demise. Especially if I wasn’t convicted for it. And this continuously highlighting the one statistic (0 convictions in 2016) is clearly cherry-picking data. The thing about data is that it fluctuates about a mean or trend. I asked you long ago, to give the figures for the years surrounding 2016 and you declined to do so. Why might this be? For example if a politician get a shedfull of declining data over successive years, they may wait till, by chance, one year shows a slight improvement and bucks this trend to some extent, at this point they make a press release about the improvement that they have brought about since last year. If the upturn or downturn in wildlife crime prosecutions in this case, is within statistical error it is meaningless to claim an improvement. The data has to be given for several successive years at least, so the reader can make their own judgement as to how much these numbers fluctuate anyway.
“That is why the last parliamentary debate dismissed any idea of any change in the law. And that is why there is insufficient support today for the idea of banning driven grouse shooting to even get enough signatures to generate another debate.”
No it’s not, the reason why parliamentary debate dismissed changing the law was because there was an important debate that day in the House of Commons at the same time, about the pension entitlements of a lot of people. This had priority.
“As for SNH report 982, well it’s deja vu all over again, isn’t it.
‘The views expressed by the author(s) of this report should not be
taken as the views and policies of Scottish Natural Heritage.’
‘References:
…… RSPB. 2015. The Illegal Killing of Birds of Prey in Scotland 1994 – 2014: a Review. RSPB Scotland, Edinburgh.’
SNH report 982
What about a second opinon, from someone with over 40 years experience of Scottish eagles, from somewhere that has no driven grouse shooting?
‘When he settled in Scotland in the mid-1970s he was converted to a conservation outlook and has devoted his time since to monitoring our local Golden Eagles. Over the years John has seen a slow decline in our local population, with the survey this year showing 5 ranges which he once had occupied now to be vacant. Why? We can’t know for sure and it’s probably a mix of factors rather than a sole cause, with these possibly including increased human disturbance, a declining food supply and habitat degradation. Climate change may be an issue too, with our weather being variable and extreme over recent winters and springs; with some fine spells but unsettled times too, which could be impacting eagle prey. John himself wonders whether atmospheric pollution has been a cause, with Europe’s industrial emissions being dumped down within our upland’s high rainfall over decades, perhaps augmented by Chernobyl – he noticed big declines in many species from the mid-1980s onwards. Our declining eagle population will come as no surprise to many who head to our local hills, with many folk of John’s generation noting how scarce many of our bird species have become compared to decades ago. (A local decline in Peregrines highlighted by the 2014 national survey reflects this too.)’
Also, in a spirit of helpfulness, here’s another top tip, not from me but from a raptor fieldworker of over 15 years experience:
‘…. By not visiting nests perhaps trails were not left which foxes might follow.’
Birding guide to the Isle of Skye”
Have you got these quotes tattooed on your wrists, or something, because this is getting very silly indeed? So you cite the onion of, is it one person? But it’s not an onion is it, it’s a lettuce leaf, because it only has 1 layer. And weigh this against a government commissioned report, written by Whitfield and Fielding, a world renowned biologists and statistician. I will quote directly from RPUK
“Between them, they have over 70 years worth of ecological experience, have published over 150 peer-reviewed scientific papers, written hundreds of commissioned reports, and authored five books, including one on statistical analysis (authored by Dr Fielding, a lecturer on statistics at Manchester Metropolitan University). For good reason, they are held in extremely high regard within the academic and conservation communities and have a particular expertise on the ecology and conservation of hen harriers and golden eagles, having co-authored the respective Government-commissioned Conservation Frameworks for these species. It’s quite obvious why SNH commissioned them to undertake the golden eagle satellite tag review; they were the best qualified scientists to do this research.”
And out of about 100 citations, you highlight 2 individual references involving the RSPB as if this is the sum of them!!! Staggering.
Tim you are lost on Bitnovmoor.
The peer review process exists for a reason:
‘He who pays the piper calls the tune’
‘There are lies, damn lies and statistics’
‘Rubbish in, rubbish out’
And so on and………..
I’m afraid JSM (deceased)’s reply to Tim Bidie’s original polemic had very little effect, perhaps you should invite him back for another guest blog, Mark!
if your wondering, here is a direct link https://markavery.info/2015/01/14/guest-blog-good-intentions-paving-company-tim-bidie-aka-monro-bellow/#comment-664737
Read that – and particularly like this comment:-
“Tim Brook Says:
JANUARY 14, 2015 AT 3:58 PM
So, in far fewer words;
It is essential to kill predators like Foxes and Stoats, so that they don’t kill predators like Hen Harriers, but we then have to kill predators like Hen Harriers so that they don’t kill predators like Curlews and Grouse, but we’re not really bothered about the little things that they predate as we can’t really see them so we’ll make sure there’s far too many of them so that we can justifiably kill them anyway.
Oh, and anything that may have been controlled by the Foxes Stoats and Hen Harriers in the first place, like Hares, Rabbits, Squirrels, if we don’t like them then we can justifiably kill them too because ‘somebody’ killed all the predators…
I guess it just comes down to that fact that some people like killing.”
I suppose when we train people in our armed services to use weapons to kill or maim our fellow men/women then it’s not surprising to find that they consider killing other species as acceptable and even “fun” pretending to be a “sport”. No wonder so many suffer mental problems thereafter. I feel quite sorry for Mr.Bidie. Perhaps its not his fault really? It’s his training,
That warm glow you get inside, when you end a life???
As an exercise in cherry picking, optimism and self delusion your post would be hard to beat Tim. My sister and wildlife mad five year old nephew live in Currie, very close to where Fred’s satellite tag stopped working. I only found out last September that there was driven grouse shooting so near Edinburgh, rather amazed in fact that it should be so close to so many and mean so very, very little to them. Well now an awful lot more know because a young golden eagle lived near it for a very short time….before taking up Scuba diving it seems. Driven Grouse Shooting now means something to many more, the loss of the truly special, which turning wild birds into a glorified clay pigeon isn’t.
In retrospect I can’t remember seeing as much as a buzzard in that area. That’s the gist of it Tim DGS making everything that isn’t a red grouse expendable the moment you think it gets in the way of shooting them (waders wouldn’t last long if that happened) and everybody who thinks the uplands should be for more than blasting grouse, well they’re second class, and in fact shouldn’t even be on the moors in the first place, gets in the way of the shooting! Even in Scotland’s central belt you needn’t be very far from a golden eagle, as long as they were left alone, Fred could have been in a pioneering wave of golden eagles settling the Ochils, Pentland Hills and Lammermuirs, Slamannan Plateau. Sadly even the much wilder parts of Southern, Central and Eastern Scotland have a dearth of eagles as well as hen harriers, peregrine falcons, red kites, goshawks, short eared owls and even buzzards. In fact a huge amount of wildlife is missing from bats to pollinating insects, juniper, wildcat, capercaillie, crested tit, dwarf birch.
That’s what happens when you impose fire as a ‘management’ tool where it really isn’t part of the ecology – the wildlife leaves, you’re left with shreds of it. Cores of peat have revealed that significant fires only happened naturally about every hundred and fifty or two hundred years approximately and they were never severe enough to reduce the uplands to a monotonous expanse of old and young heather with a few boggy bits. We need grouse moors to raise the cash to keep them as grouse moors? No thanks not worth it.
Another wee point Tim, I get the impression you’re one of those people who aren’t really of the country, but think because you ‘do’ field sports you are – in fact maybe that’s the reason for them a phony badge of belonging to assuage a a sense of guilt/inadequacy for people that don’t really have a direct connection to what the country is really for which is feeding us all. I’ve lived and worked on a farm, through accident not planning, which I am very glad for because it gave me the personal experience to say that my suspicions about the ‘countryside’ were essentially correct, it’s not much different from the town really except that when people sit down to watch Eastenders in the country their houses tend to be surrounded by fields rather than other houses. That’s pretty much it.
I did see what happens to a chicken coop when a fox gets into it, but I had been expecting that to happen, because the farmer instructed me and another farm worker to make it by chucking together old doors and bits of fence to make a piece of crap that townie me knew wouldn’t keep a fox out for a week. It didn’t. I did see the damage done by the local rabbits digging up and biting through our plastic irrigation piping, and I heard the story of another local farmer that was so desperate that he dug a trench round his crops and filled it with slurry (don’t think the EA would have been chuffed) to keep the rabbits off. Still the locals shot foxes. At times not much rhyme or reason in ‘the country’, and field sport enthusiasts seem to be the most befuddled, just people at the end of the day.
There are enough serious wildfires in The Republic of Ireland every year to be visible from space! And a fair few in Scotland as well.
Enjoy!
https://www.nasa.gov/image-feature/goddard/2017/irelands-gorse-wildfires-creating-havoc-0
http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-highlands-islands-39843175
Yes there are fires because large parts of the country have been reduced to fire susceptible moor – especially heather, and that also includes areas for sheep. Mature deciduous woodland in particular is far more fire resilient. The vast stretches of heather grouse moor we have in Scotland facilitate wildfire. Natural ecosystems would be nowhere near so fire prone. You seem to have a definite problem processing information Tim, you can’t deal with anything that contradicts your world view so you side step or create a smoke screen, or ignore of course.
Tim, I hope everybody follows these links you’re providing and reads them – I don’t think you have. As I commented above, the NASA article about Ireland describes how 466/511 ‘wild’ fires were deliberately started, mostly for the purposes of controlling vegetation…
Welcome to your future.
Endless circular debates? No that’s my past.
In our dreams…..
The misuse of the word ‘evidence’ is becoming tiresome.
If the cause of raptor decline is that they eat each other, then how have they managed to exist for millennia Tim? Raptors were almost extinct in the 1980s because of DDT so if you take that as your baseline then yes ooo upward trend in raptor numbers. If you want to make any valid arguments, you must use real scientific evidence.
I’ve noticed that the death by drowning figures rise sharply in line with ice cream sales at the coast. Err Tim that doesn’t mean we should have a hunt to cull ice cream sellers
I agree entirely with Tim Bidie’s comments. I speak as an observer of Hen Harriers for a total of around 300 hours at Langholm and the North Pennines. I also used to shoot driven grouse in a sustainable way, maximum personal bag for a day, 2 brace. the quality of recent debate, e petitions etc is feeble and the only loser will be the Hen Harrier. Proper evidence based analysis of mortality of tagged fledging juveniles is the top priority. Current reliance on a study of tagging adult Black Kites, a scavenger rather than arial hunter is inadequate. conservation Science must get it’s own house in order. Equally commercial shooting of huge bags of grouse and all that goes with it should rightly be questioned.Those who work in field conservation and on the grouse moors are stuck in the middle of poor quality, minimal evidence based debate.
“Equally commercial shooting of huge bags of grouse and all that goes with it should rightly be questioned”.
In case you hadn’t noticed, this is precisely what this blog, RPUK and others have been doing.
You claim that the quality of recent debate, e-petitions etc has been feeble and the only loser will be the Hen Harrier. Please can you outline by what logic you arrive at this conclusion? If you are a believer in high quality debate then you will realize that simply flinging out assertions such as “the only loser will be the Hen Harrier” with no evidence in support is not exactly a persuasive argument.
The hen harrier will only be the loser if they continue to get shot by criminals, which you imply they will, as that’s the only form of HH mortality this debate could influence – thanks for acknowledging that the killing will continue.
So what did you do after you’ve bagged your ‘two brace’? Go back and sit and vegetate in the Range-Rover for a couple of hours whilst your fellow shooters satisfied their blood-lust? Sorry, I don’t believe you!
“It’s about who governs us. Us or them”
In a small country where large tracts of land are owned by a minority and managed for the enjoyment of that minority, is it not inevitable that this will result in a them or us mentality on both sides?
I assume you are @Monrover who I used to cross swords with on the Guardian, as your arguments were identical to those you used to post here under a similar username.
This arguments presented here are classic sophistry. That is your arguments are superficially plausible, but on closer examination these argument are clearly fallacious and based on knowing falsehoods, and multiple logical fallacies. You are obviously intelligent, and so must be well aware that you are knowingly using false argument, and making knowing false assertions to support your case. You know very well that your arguments will not convince any informed person, and clearly that is not your intention. Self-evidently you are trying to mislead the less informed public who you hope will not notice the multiple falsehoods in your argument.
Let’s deal with the one major logical fallacy, repeated throughout this dire piece. Throughout you refer to a “shooting ban”, “a ban on grouse shooting”, “Proponents of a shooting ban” etc. This is the quite deliberate and knowing use of the straw man logical fallacy, where you dishonestly misrepresent your opponents argument to make it easy to argue against, and argue against this misrepresentation as if it were what they actually said. At no point do you acknowledge the self-evident truth.
You know very well that the campaign of Mark Avery, Chris Packham et al, is to ban “driven grouse shooting”. This is a particular form of “grouse shooting”, and not all “grouse shooting” as you dishonestly imply. This is because the traditional style of British grouse shooting is “walking up”, which is entirely different to “driven grouse shooting” which requires unnaturally high densities of grouse, or gamebirds in general, with driven shooting in general. As a shooter you know darn well the difference between “walking up” and “driven shooting”. You also know very well that neither Mark Avery, Chris Packham, or other major figures proposing a ban on “driven grouse shooting” are proposing a total ban on shooting. Yes, some birders, those concerned with animal rights etc, would like to see a total ban on shooting, as they are entitled to do. But this is not the majority, and most certainly not the campaigns you refer to.
It is this type of knowing dishonesty which reveals what your arguments are about. The attempt to bamboozle the public with dishonest misrepresentation of the fact. I could go on. You use another well known logical fallacy to misrepresent the facts on the reason for the lack of raptors on upland managed grouse moors, Foxes etc. Of course the irony is that keepers on managed grouse moors do their best to kill all the Foxes, meaning if it is Foxes predating Hen Harrier nests on managed shoots, which is the problem, the keepers cannot be doing their job properly. Maybe they are too pre-occupied with other activities, like trying to kill raptors?
However, as the recent BTO report on breeding Peregrines makes clear, there are the same mysterious black holes on managed grouse moors when it comes to Peregrines, and once thriving breeding Peregrines on managed grouse moors have often completely disappeared. Whilst oddly Peregrines thrive in the surrounding areas. Except for some ground nesting Peregrines, which are in the minority, Peregrines tend to nest on cliff faces if available, where they are safe from Foxes, but not those with firearms. Of course none of this fits in with your narrative, but then again you’re not interested in truth and fact, only trying to bamboozle the uninformed public with false rhetoric.
You see with enough words it is possible to dismantle and prove false nearly every assertion you make. It is just practically difficult, and as you cynically know very well, most people are put off reading long detailed accounts. It is possible to make entirely false assertions in just one or two sentences. But proving that these assertions are false with evidence requires long detailed accounts, much longer than the false assertions you have used.
As I say, this is not a debate, because virtually everything you say can be entirely refuted with fact, evidence and detailed argument. You are trying to create doubt. You are trying create doubt in the minds of the uninformed public, that grouse shooters are not really responsible for the illegal killing of birds of prey, and those wanting to ban “driven grouse shooting” not all grouse shooting, let alone all shooting, are fanatics with pseudo religious fanaticism. No these people are reasonable, often scientifically qualified conservationists, who don’t want to ban all shooting, even though often they personally don’t agree with it. They only want to ban a particular form of shooting which is predicated by the illegal persecution of protected raptors. It is a conservation issue, and not the type of campaign you knowingly and falsely imply.
Sorry for being so blunt, it isn’t personal. My points are based on what you argue, not against you personally. If you present false argument, again and again, then it is fair to say you are engaging in deliberate sophistry, without this being the ad hominen logical fallacy. Note I specifically state, what you say, which are false, and I don’t just attack you personally (although you use this logical fallacy with your “religious belief”slur) The errors in your argument have been repeatedly pointed out to you, and on this basis I am quite entitled by reason to conclude that this is deliberate sophistry, and not just sloppy argument.
Brilliant. Get this re-posted on your main blog homepage Mark
I don’t think that it is necessarily the case that TB was deliberately misrepresenting others arguments by using logical fallacies. When you get a bunch of people in entrenched positions, under pressure they will employ any argument unaware of flawed logic to bolster their position. The alternative is to back down and accept that you are wrong, something requiring great humility. Not that many people have this.
Yes, as people get more desperate to support their failed arguments, then naturally they slip into using logical fallacies and well known false arguments to sustain their position, without realising it. However, when you have explained to that person in depth, with multiple authoritative references why their position is false, there comes a point in time, when you are forced to conclude that they must be knowingly using false argument. I’m assuming that Mr Bidie was @Monrover on the Guardian, because he was certainly @Monro here, and their arguments and style was identical, and so were their flurries of activity.
Let me give a simple example of clear misrepresentation of the facts. Throughout this article Tim Bidie repeatedly misrepresents the arguments of Mark Avery, Chris Packham etc, as an attempt to ban all grouse shooting or all forms of game shooting. This is repeated a number of times in different forms, and therefore it cannot be bad phrasing. He’s most definitely claiming it is an attempt to ban all grouse shooting, or to ban all shooting.
This cannot be a mistake. Mark Avery, Chris Packham etc, have been campaigning to ban “driven grouse shooting” as it is predicated on the illegal persecution of raptors. Driven shooting is where beaters drive gamebirds towards a line of guns. This requires unnaturally high densities of gamebirds, which is why it is predicated on trying to eliminate all predators. Not just because these predators eat the gamebirds, but because the predators are drawn to such unnatural densities of potential prey, and in response the gamebirds will disperse. When gamebirds on a shoot disperse, they are effectively lost to the shoot, and the unnaturally high density required for driven shooting is lost.
However, the traditional style of British shooting is “walking up”. Here a smaller group of shooters walk around, usually with dogs, which flush the gamebirds. With this style much lower numbers of gamebirds are shot and it is not therefore necessary to have such an unnaturally high density of gamebirds. Therefore it is not necessary to eliminate all predators, including legally protected predators such as raptors.
Mark, Chris etc, are not campaigning to ban all types of shooting They are not campaigning to ban walked up shooting. Tim Bidie knows this very well, it has been repeatedly pointed out to him. He is an experienced shooter and knows very well the difference between driven shooting, and walking up.
Therefore, when Tim Bidie repeatedly characterizes this as an attempt to ban all forms of grouse shooting, or all game shooting, Tim Bidie knows very well that he is misrepresenting the facts and the arguments of others. You see lots of his arguments, such as the abandonment of grouse moors wouldn’t be valid if they could still be used for grouse shooting, just not driven grouse shooting.
I know very well that Tim Bidie has got excellent attention to detail, when he wants. He knows very well what the situation is. Pretending to believe that Mark and Chris etc, are campaigning to ban all forms of grouse shooting, or all shooting, is not an accident. He is well aware of what he is doing.
Thin end of wedge fallacy,
The phrase “gish gallop” comes to mind. As the OED describes it:
“Named for the debate tactic created by creationist shill Duane Gish, a Gish Gallop involves spewing so much bullshit in such a short span on that your opponent can’t address let alone counter all of it.”
The number of successful prosecutions for raptor persecution is always going to be low to zero whilst it remains necessary to prove individual blame(and vicarious liability does not seem to make much difference). Should licensing be adopted, then removal of a licence for a suspected persecution event from an estate will count as a prosecution even if no individual is punished.
You talk about other pressures on raptor populations as if these should be considered to be a more likely cause of low numbers of raptors than persecution. We all accept that in nature, populations fluctuate naturally, but such natural fluctuations don’t explain why the population of hen harriers in England is 100X less than there is habitat available for.
The Welsh hen harrier has suffered a slight decline, but is relativity stable compared to the english population, it’s often argued that the Welsh harrier decline can’t be because of persecution as there are no driven grouse moors in Wales so it must be other pressures, like those you list. Don’t forget however that birds fly, they disperse and travel round, satellite tags have shown them moving over large distances at times before settling at a potential territory. For Welsh harriers, all that unoccupied land in England must be really tempting for them, what with high prey densities and low competition. Trouble is, once these Welsh hen harriers arrive there, they become vulnerable to the same persecution as their English counterparts.
When the government, politicians, etc, deal with any societal and crime problem, whether it be drug smuggling, drug dealing, looting, football hooliganism, stalking and much more, they never go purely by the level of successful prosecutions. The assumption always is that the problem is much bigger than the level of successful prosecutions indicate. In fact, sometimes there has never been a successful prosecution of some societal problems widely discussed. They always use inference to indicate the scale of the problem i.e. circumstantial evidence etc.
This argument about successful prosecutions is egregiously false. We know very well from dead raptors, which have been shot, poisoned, trapped, disappearing birds with satellite tags, the discovery of illegal traps, poisoned bait, etc, that the problem is much larger than the meagre successful prosecutions are part of a much large problem. What is more that the deaths of raptors, the discovery of traps, the disappearance of satellite tagged birds is just the tip of the iceberg. It is obvious that when most raptors are illegally killed, persecuted through the destruction of nests etc, that there will be no objective discoverable evidence that this has happened.
Once again, using drug smuggling, dealing as an analogy. The authorities never assume that the detected crimes are the only crimes or how else would drug users get drugs? It is a completely contrived and false argument to suggest that the amount of successful prosecutions is an indicator of the scale of the problem. Especially given the meagre resources devoted to detecting illegal raptor persecution.
When you see travesties, like the reversal of the financial penalties levied on the Stody Estate for their failure to control Allen Lambert’s killing spree, you realise that the whole system is biased in favour of wildlife criminals. It is all about class and money: how many judges, senior police officers and CPS barristers are invited for days out shooting? To hunt balls? They are of a class / mentality with the landowners and their bias is palpable.
There’s a very simple answer to your claim that an appropriate response to the removal of apex predators is culling. And that response is – give us back our apex predators.
Perhaps in your next blog you’d care to explain to us why the disappearances of so many raptors are clustered around moors managed for DGS, rather than the usual attempts at misdirection.
The distribution of wildlife is affected by many factors.
In this case, the distribution of raptors is affected by food supply (which changes seasonally and annually), habitat quality, weather in both the immediate area and landscape. All of these are factors known to affect hen harrier, golden eagle and other species. Consequently, giving a single reason for a perceived absence of occupancy is extremely difficult to support, evidence.
You have no credible peer reviewed evidence to support your views.
Debate without credible evidence is just so much hot air.
Why do all apologists for the shooting industry have to use such obviously false argument? It puts conservationists, birders etc, in a very difficult position, because all they can do is to criticise these arguments for being so obviously false and misleading.
SteB has said what I wanted to say so well I won’t try to repeat it.
But I think it is worth pointing out another issue. The people who support driven grouse shooting much more often live in places far from where it happens, as the petition maps show. DGS is much more popular in Chelsea than Hebden Bridge. For such a committed supporter of DGS to not only not live in a DGS shooting area, not live even in “The Country”, but actually in *another country* is quite telling.
I’m presuming Mr Bidie is a UK citizen so he has every right to express an opinion about a UK matter, but can you image the reaction if the situation was reversed? If it really was mostly town dwellers who wanted a ban, and then some ex pat chimed in to support them; the Field Sports lobby would have a field day! Look at how they’ve treated Chris Packham; vicious public attacks and shameful personal insults about his mental difference. Even Dr Mark Avery was consistently referred to in the debate as “Mister Avery, who knows nothing about science”.
Yet Mr Bidie is invited to comment here, and I’m glad he has had a reasonably polite response. I’ve done quite a few Public Inquiries in my time, and always found that the nastier and more devious the opposition tactics the worse their case is. People with good cases don’t need to be underhand, or insulting, or cherry pick, or make straw man arguments, or promote plausible untruths to the uninformed. The fact that the DGS lobby feels it has to do all of those things shows we’re winning.
But finally, I have to give Mr Bridie a bit of credit for writing here again. It’s easy to address those you agree with, much harder to address those who strongly disagree with you. So I acknowledge your courage, Tim, but urge you to step back from fighting your cause for a moment and think a bit harder about how valid your arguments really are. If DGS, or indeed any other Field Sport, does get banned it won’t be because some minority of rabid animal rights activists have some anti-democratic agenda. It’ll be because everyone else got fed up with people who think their power and privilege puts them above the law, and got fed up with clever arguments being used to conceal observed reality not illuminate it. As Big Tobacco found, those tactics might work for a while but not for ever, and the backlash can be fearsome when it comes.
“no amount of evidence appears to make any difference to the stance of this blog which continues to call for draconian sanctions against game shooting.”
On the contrary, no amount of evidence seems to convince Tim Bidie of the blindingly obvious. The frequency and clumping of raptor disappearances tell a clear tale. Satellite tagged golden eagles are 25x more likely to go missing in Scotland than in Europe. 25x!!!! http://www.snh.org.uk/pdfs/publications/commissioned_reports/982.pdf
And where do they go missing? On or around grouse moors. That’s why the Scottish government, SNH and the Scottish Police all agree that these disappearances are “suspicious”. Just because nobody has been convicted doesn’t mean a crime hasn’t been committed. Ask Mrs Litvinenko. Or the poor surviving Skripals.
So long as apologists like Tim keep up this nonsense, the persecution will go on. And the longer it goes on the more likely it is that in the end driven grouse shooting will be banned. At that time all shooting will be reflected in a bad light, but they will have nobody to blame but themselves.
I gave this a like because it entertained me.
Tim, I agree with the thread of your argument with regard to the hunting act, you can always rely on
Mr Skinner to give an honest appraisal, even if some of the others tried to hide their true reasons for
supporting a ban.
Mind you, from personal experience, I would say there is ( or was), greater enthusiasm for Fieldsports in his constituency than in many areas affected by the act.
However, you fall into the trap of quoting the lack of prosecutions, as being indicative of a low level of Raptor persecution, when it has been the removal, and continued absence, of certain species from Bowland , Dark Peak, Cairngorms , etc. that gives the lie to your argument.
No need to address the scientific flaws in Tim’s arguments – I commend the comments by Alastair and Callum, amongst others.
Personally, I hardly ever think about shooting. It’s a bit like watching ‘Eastenders’, football, or buying an Audi. I wish people wouldn’t do it, but not enough to want to see those things banned. However, I think a lot about the persecution of a whole range of wildlife that goes with DGS.
Shooting will see themselves as a community, and I totally get why that community might want to get the wagons into a circle. However, shooting needs to realise (and to its credit, ‘Shooting Times’ has done this) that the divide is not between shooting and conservation, but between DGS and shooting/conservation. DGS is doing your pastime an enormous amount of harm and reputational damage.
DGS is betting the house that nothing will ever change, and it will have a sympathetic government at Westminster to hide behind forever. But that won’t happen because nothing ever stays the same. And as Theresa May found out, supporting hunting is electoral suicide. Sooner or later, there will be change. The question is whether shooting can take ownership of the issue and change in a way that preserves the pastime for the future, or whether it passively waits for change to be imposed from outside – possibly not in the way shooting would like.
The smart move would be to say shooting wants nothing to do with wildlife crime, and, for starters, embrace a licencing scheme that could potentially put the criminal element within DGS out of business permanently.
The question is, are they that smart?
No! They are all obviously and infuriatingly stupid!
Very easy to write off those with whom you disagree: intellectual arrogance.
What countrymen across the board will get behind is: an evidence based approach to wildlife management with a willingness to sanction experimental research into the reintroduction of apex predators to control species lower down the food chain and research which provides greater insights into predator prey relationships, disease management and the control of alien species.
What they will not support is an unevidenced, shouty, campaign, based on hyperbole, in support of extremist and outdated political dogma.
“Very easy to write off those with whom you disagree: intellectual arrogance”.
Pot calling the kettle black? – what with your hand-waving away evidence you don’t like, imputing motives on people that you have no evidence they hold, posting irrelevant Monty Python clips to imply that people are making things up and generally dismissive attitude to everyone on this site…
“What countrymen across the board will get behind…” Since when did you speak for countrymen across the board?
If you had any credible peer reviewed evidence, you would have presented it but you have none. The written evidence submitted to parliament similarly contained no credible peer reviewed evidence in support of a ban on driven grouse shooting, exactly the point that I make above.
Tim – that’s simply untrue, ins’t it.
I have seen no credible peer reviewed evidence either on this blog or presented to parliament that makes a convincing case for a ban on driven grouse shooting.
This follows a similar pattern to the debate on hunting, where no credible peer reviewed evidence was ever presented to the Burns Report on hunting to support a ban.
That is why the ban had to be forced through parliament against its stated will.
Without compelling and convincing peer reviewed evidence, any campaign to ban grouse shooting will have to follow a similar course.
Does your definition of “credible” say that it has to reaffirm your opinion, per chance?
Of course not. But if driven grouse shooting is ever to be banned, it should be banned as a consequence of a peer reviewed evidential base sufficient to carry the opinions of the open minded.
In the self serving ‘Birdcrime’ papers the rspb simply anoints itself as judge, witnesses and jury all in one rather partial and partisan package.
No doubt, it will be. This all sounds a bit like a big drama, staged to play your victim card. Look forward to that.
“In the long run we are all dead” John Maynard Keynes
I had hoped Mr Bidie might say something interesting.
This rehashed drivel does not merit a serious response.
The article has so much wrong with it that I’ll waste no more time on it than writing these few words.
Ignorance has reached a new level, it’s gone off the scale.
PS.
Is the article a wind up?
I know exactly what you mean , Mick. I regularly tell myself that I must listen carefully and try to engage with the arguments of the shooters, and never, ever, be rude or dismissive towards them.
But then I read something like this, and my good intentions go straight out the window.
So, he saw a Red Kite eating a Kestrel and states that this form of predation ‘is borne out by studies into the diet of kites’. Where is the evidence for this? Might it be that he’s confusing Red Kites with Goshawks, though the feeding techniques of the two species could hardly be more disparate. In “The Goshawk’ (P. 205) Robert Kenward refers to a study undertaken by Steve Petty et al in which remains of 139 Kestrels were detected in Goshawk prey. See:
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1046/j.1474-919X.2003.00191.x/abstract
If the rest of Mr Bidie’s research and knowledge is as reliable as his views on this particular issue, we can safely kick his submission into the long grass!
Just embarrassed he’s got Scottish roots ,allegedly.
Me too.
Donald Trump has Scottish roots. It’s probably not a measure of character.
I’m just embarrassed to be the same species as him! “Bookends”?… More like Bell end! 🙂
There is only one suitable reply to such a load of drivel: LOL.
Away from the main thrust of Tim’s tiresome “predator persecution is made up” chat, I was intrigued by his statement that “thousands of lambs, piglets, (are) slaughtered by rogue foxes every year.”
Is there any evidence of this?
The hunting lobby are always keen to talk up the threat foxes pose to livestock, but as far as I can find out, no scientific study has borne this out. One study reported fox diet to be made up of just 7% large mammals, and we may assume the majority, if the not the entirety of that derives from scavenging. Foxes seem to mostly eat small rodents and as such may be doing the farmer a favour! People have long confused scavenging and predation. For example, the bone swallowing lammergeier was named for the belief that it ate lambs (and even children!). If foxes were really a threat to sheep or lambs you would expect them to respond in the same way to foxes that they do to dogs, but they don’t. They ignore foxes. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1qFF9tD3wD8
I have come to the conclusion that the threat of foxes to livestock has been misrepresented in order to justify the sport of hunting them.
Similarly, I believe the threat posed by birds of prey and corvids to lambs has been exaggerated (see Marquiss et al. 2003), and the true reason for the vilification of these birds is more to do with the threat they pose to game birds. Since it is legal to kill corvids to protect livestock, but not to protect game birds, we are pedalled the story that corvids are some great threat to lambs, but the reality seems to be that attacks are rare. I would be interested if anyone has evidence to the contrary.
The evidence if there is any is very suspect. The whole idea of “rogue Foxes” is similarly stupid. What you call humans that tear Foxes to people for fun, “rogue human beings”?
Foxes killing lambs is just more drivel! Where is the scientific evidence. Where in all the millions of hours of footage of foxes in our countryside is there any film of a fox killing a lamb? Even hunting lambs? Sheep and foxes take no notice of each other at all. A ewe would be more than a match for any fox!
I know there was a study on Mull where there aren’t any foxes or badgers and sheep/lamb mortality was just the same as where foxes existed. In one of his books Hugh Falkus mentions seeing a fox grab a live lamb and run off with it, but that’s it. I think ‘vermin’ mainly serves a bit of a political and economic purpose in being a supposed threat to livestock. So much better to blame lamb losses on sea eagles than shoddy husbandry and an animal from the deserts of the middle east being stuck on shelter less Scottish hills. Yeah say that you as a crofter are now being driven to the brink of poverty by those conservationists and their meddling with sea eagles that puts birds in front of people! That’s good for getting fawned over by the media and compensation of course. I wonder if they still blame golden eagles for taking lambs or has that function now been taken over totally by the sea eagle, bit more convincing as it’s bigger I suppose.
Remarkably in Norway where they have lynx, bear, wolf and wolverine and they graze sheep deep INTO woodland there is no verification required for compensation claims for losing your sheep to these species – you just get the money basically. The NFU etc are using the phenomenal number of claims for sheep losses to lynx in Norway as an argument against bringing it back to blighty. However, there has been…ah hmm…some question over the ‘accuracy’ of the claims. I’ve also heard that in France there was compensation to shepherds if they lost sheep to feral dogs, when they moved back to some of their old areas compensation for loss of sheep to a bear was set at a higher level. Now it seems feral dogs are no longer killing sheep and it’s all down to bears, kie..ching!
Then there are the various schemes in Scotland to compensate farmers for damage caused by wild geese, and there are rumours that the claims for comp have been a bit OTT. So who’s milking who really? Not very easy when you’re working in partnership with people to point the finger at them even with good cause, but they shouldn’t be treated as sacred cows either. Some sections of the farming community are really doing their best to derail having the beaver, lynx or more trees back in the country and on the hills – just keep it as it is and the subsidies for unproductive agriculture coming in thank you. Might be time to start putting the foot down a bit.
Yup. That was the Hewson 1981 thesis comparing lamb production on Mull (without foxes) and mainland (with foxes) which showed no difference. The references Tim Bidie cites, when traced back to original references, confirm what I suspected – that fox predation can occur, but that it is rare to the point of being insignificant. Part of the problem is that farmers conflate scavenging and predation, but expert analysis of carcasses allows straightforward differentiation by examining bleeding. In Australia Alexander et al. 1967 described foxes foraging for afterbirths among unconcerned ewes and lambs in a lambing paddock, again showing how low sheep assess the risk from foxes. It may be more common on hill farms than lowland ones, but when White et al. (2000) compared two Scottish hill farms where overall lamb mortality was at 10.2 and 9.3% (lower than Welsh average of 15% reported here: https://businesswales.gov.wales/farmingconnect/posts/improving-lamb-survival) actual fox predation on live lambs accounted for only 0.2 and 0.6% of overall mortality, or less than one in two hundred lambs. In other words: sheep die. This is typically due to poor nutrition, disease and problems giving birth which may be linked to genetic and breeding issues, but all too often is blamed on foxes.
Re foxes: https://www.google.com.cy/search?tbo=p&tbm=bks&q=isbn:1402085532
Re corvids:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KpphQ9_OWQw
https://www.jstor.org/stable/2401823
“Crows attacked 48% of lambs found dead on the hill. Examination of the wounds showed that only 17% of these lambs were alive when attacked. The body condition of the latter showed that in most cases the lambs had exhausted their fat reserves and were on the point of starvation before being attacked. Crows did not select healthy lambs, and the range of body condition of lambs attacked was similar to lambs dying without being attacked. (5) In most cases crows killed only lambs that would die anyway”.
Do you read the references you link to?
Did you look at the camera footage?
Yes – no lamb was killed or even actually pecked as far as I could see. Even if the lamb had been killed what do you think this would have proved? I don’t think anyone has ever claimed that corvids never attack lambs and a single case hardly proves this is a significant cause of a lamb mortality. As it was the ewe was doing a good job of protecting her lamb.
PS did you watch it?
There is a marvellous place on your high street that will give you a free eye test.
By blithely ignoring that which stares you in the face, you wonderfully underline the points I make above.
Thank you.
Did you see a lamb killed in that footage Tim? Honestly? If so it is you that needs to visit an optician although I doubt they will be able to help you as they can only help you see what is in front of you in clearer focus – they can’t do anything abut what you imagine you can see.
‘….we are pedalled the story that corvids are some great threat to lambs, but the reality seems to be that attacks are rare. I would be interested if anyone has evidence to the contrary.’
Video evidence provided.
But don’t take my word for it
Contact Dr Andy Douse, SNH Policy & Advice Manager, Ornithology:
‘Ravens do kill lambs, and there are well-documented reports across the world, for most species of raven. There is very good evidence to suggest that attacks on lambs are something that has been going on for many years in areas where ravens have been, and still are, common.’
https://www.nature.scot/sites/default/files/2017-07/A253116%20-Guidance%20-%20Licensing%20predator%20control%20-%20Raven%20information%20note%20-%2029%20April%202009.pdf
Refusal to accept irrefutable evidence simply underlines the points that I make above.
Poor lambs with snowy fleeces, so soft and clean, such mild mannered, kind, sweet and gentle creatures, falling victim to pure evil, the Red Fox and Black Crow, is one possible narrative.
Another could be that it is kinder in the in the long run to be quickly dispatched by scavengers. Sound familiar?
Should really have posted this blog in 16 days time.
Marginally more interesting than Beefy’s comments but still waffle from top to bottom. Next.
What an obnoxious little shit. The Vladimir Putin of the British Army: they must really hate you.
Little wonder you served the Sultan of Oman: The government of Oman continued in 2016 to restrict the rights to freedom of expression, association, and assembly. Authorities continued to prosecute journalists, bloggers, and social media activists.
Oman’s kafala (sponsorship) immigrant labour system and lack of labour law protections leaves the country’s more than 140,000 migrant domestic workers exposed to abuse and exploitation by employers, whose consent they need to change jobs. Those who flee abuse—including beatings, sexual abuse, unpaid wages, and excessive working hours— have little avenue for redress and can face legal penalties for “absconding.”
Oman has no laws prohibiting domestic violence and marital rape.
The Omani penal code punishes consensual sex between men or between women with six months to three years in prison.
Courts across the country sentenced activists to prison terms on the basis of vaguely defined laws that limit free speech, including through criminalizing “insulting the Sultan” and “undermining the prestige of the state.”
I’m not in the least surprised to find you are proud of defending that bunch of uncivilised bastards.
My dear fellow!
Why not give Amy a call?
http://amychilds.com/
Actually the best bit comes at the end with a series of quotes used to argue that banning driven grouse shooting is essentially class war. I openly admit that politically I am an Anarcho-Marxist, recognising the importance of Marx as a forerunner in a scientific analysis of history (if that could ever be achieved really). So having stated my analytical position, I am also a pragmatist and I think that there could be a place for walked up shooting in future environmental policies. I think land management should be capable of demonstrating environmental benefits beyond high red grouse population densities. It really is that simple.
“I am a 63 year old retired British and Sultan of Oman’s Army Officer living overseas, in Oman, running a small business advisory consultancy in Muscat, helping small to medium sized British and European Companies achieve business there.
I am a salt water (mainly) catch and release fly fisherman who occasionally shoots for the pot (with the famous labradog Bingo) and, once in a while, supports the pack of beagles that I whipped in for over 40 years ago.
Bidie is a Scottish name traceable back to the 18th century, around Stirling, possibly French Huguenot before that.
My recent ancestors served the Crown in India for very nearly a century: ”
And….?
Am I supposed to touch my forelock or fall to my knees in supplication or something? Get a life! Your days – and those of DGS are numbered.
Thanks very much for the polite comments.
Interesting to note that the rude ones remain uncensored.
As I make clear above, and many commentators underline, the majority of those reading this blog have their minds made up already; no interest in evidence.
For the one or two that do:
‘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…..’
‘……many are undoubtedly taken alive, either from the ground or in flight, and the Red Kite can show a surprising turn of speed over short distances, while in pursuit.’
‘Red Kites hunt for live prey mainly from about the time of the hatch, in May, until about the end of the year. Birds seem most important at first, with a preference for middle-sized species…..’
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/00063658109476696
TB, with all due respect you have blogged an article and in the face of all, often reasonably well thought out argument and discussion of your writing, you then go on to handwave it all away by saying:
“As I make clear above, and many commentators underline, the majority of those reading this blog have their minds made up already; no interest in evidence.”
You are essentially saying that the only valid counterargument to you blogpost is regarding the foodstuffs of Red Kites and you share a link to a source. This is very one-dimensional.
For a Munrovian you’ve Bitnovmoor than Canchew.
That should really be: for a Munrovian you seem to be on Bitnovmoor.
Indeed. Tim fails to deal with the vast majority of points made in response to his own arguments, but the red kite article was interesting and I’m grateful for that much! Of course, there is no argument to really be had about the rest of it, so I guess that’s why he steers away from that…
Mr Bidie you rather patronisingly portray those who are opposed to the illegal persecution of birds of prey in general and hen harriers in particular as being closed-minded and immune to evidence and imply that we are motivated by class envy rather than true concern for the conservation of wildlife. However, your own arguments are based on prejudice and supposition rather than hard evidence and you seem to fit your own description of having ‘made up your mind already.
You proudly post the link to the Davis and Davis paper but what does that show? Only that kestrel has been recorded in the diet of Red Kites (and not as a significant proportion of the diet) based on remains at nests and in pellets (they do not record any direct evidence of this species actually being killed by Kites). That is evidence that an opportunistic species with a broad based diet will occasionally eat all sorts of different species; it is not remotely evidence that Red Kites are a factor in the decline of any species of raptor and certainly not in the decline of Hen Harriers! In other words your waving this article about is simply smoke and mirrors intended to make your argument appear scientific but actually irrelevant to the discussion.
At the same time you refuse to acknowledge widely accepted evidence for the ongoing persecution of birds of prey and pretend that ‘the few incidents…do not affect the generally improving population trend line’. As various commenters above have pointed out it is ludicrous to use the number of successful prosecutions as a measure for the level of persecution given the enormous practical difficulties of investigating and then prosecuting such cases and I am sure you must be aware of the various cases where video evidence of the crime actually being committed failed in the courts on a technicality. Those cases may have left the number of prosecutions at zero but no reasonable person could possibly argue that the crime did not occur! In fact there is considerable, convincing evidence of widespread persecution of birds of prey by gamekeepers – see here for example http://rspb.maps.arcgis.com/apps/Cascade/index.html?appid=88c31b0019264876b99004ef35439278 and here http://www.snh.org.uk/pdfs/publications/commissioned_reports/982.pdf. The second report specifically addresses the potential impact of transmitters as a cause of mortality (another of your red herrings!) and rules it out as a significant factor in the patterns observed.
Finally I would like to comment on your insinuation that the campaign against driven grouse shooting is based on class war and has nothing really to do with conservation. This again is an attempt to cloud the issues. I can only speak for myself but my objection to driven grouse shooting is based on the environmental harm that it causes and the association with criminality: I object strenuously to the fact that the legal protection of species should be treated with such contempt but I am not particularly interested in the fact that grouse shooters are generally very wealthy. I am not looking to see the opera banned or yachting or various other pastimes whose pursuit is generally confined to the well-heeled. I do object to anyone causing wanton harm and destruction to wild species whether that is a grouse moor operator, an egg collector stealing eggs from an eagle nest or a pigeon fancier trying to kill peregrines he suspects of killing his pigeons – the latter two both categories of wildlife criminal that the RSPB has previously pursued and prosecuted although neither is a crime associated with wealth or privilege.
As the rspb say of their publications on ‘Birdcrime’:
‘However, the figures in Birdcrime may vary from other published reports, because data sets compiled for different purposes, using very different methods,
are unlikely to be directly comparable. Consequently, there will be some variation in how incidents are recorded, assessed and categorised.’
‘The views expressed in Birdcrime are not necessarily those of the
RSPB or PAW.’
Even the open minded individual can have no confidence in publications so heavily caveated, their views disowned.
The snh report on tagged golden eagles, which shows no sign of having been peer reviewed, concludes:
‘Overall, we conclude that a relatively large number of the satellite tagged golden eagles were probably killed, mostly on or near some grouse moors where there is recent, independent evidence of illegal persecution.’
The reference? rspb figures…….the very point that I make above.
“Interesting to note that the rude ones remain uncensored.”
Gosh poor you! You must be feeling very wounded. Which comments would you wish to see censored and why?
Just to be clear, the paper Tim selectively quotes from dates from 1981, is descriptive (i.e. the authors don’t use modern prey analysis methods) and the species listed were from remains at nests or from pellets (i.e. not from direct observation). To quote:
”…The bird remains from 64 nests covered 31 species. Corvids occurred at 51 nests, the commonest being Magpie (at 36), followed by Jackdaw (25), Carrion Crow (12), Jay (5), and Rook (1), with Rook or Crow at four and ‘black corvid’ at fifteen others. Pigeon remains were found at 37 nests, including Domestic Pigeon (at 22), Woodpigeon (21), and Stock Dove (10). Black-headed Gulls turned up at 22 nests, and thrushes at 18, including 13 with Mistle Thrush and nine with Blackbird (no Song Thrushes). Lapwing appeared at nine nests and Curlew at six. The remaining records were domestic fowl (4), Red Grouse, Cuckoo, Skylark, and Chaffinch (each 3), Pheasant, Snipe, Redstart, and Starling (each 2), and single Teal, Kite (brood-mate), Kestrel, Black Grouse, Golden Plover, Lesser Black-backed Gull, Meadow Pipit, Robin, and Wheatear. The shell of a Black-headed Gull egg was found at one nest. Winter roosts yielded records of Fieldfare (2), Black-headed Gull, Domestic Pigeon, Woodpigeon, and Starling…”
By selectively cutting bits of text, and pasting them in an odd order, Ian gives a completely new meaning to what was written in the paper itself. I’m sure that wasn’t intended though.
It’s absurdly dishonest for you to pretend that you are interested in evidence and others are not. You know very well that the actuality is the other way around.
Please explain why you repeatedly falsely characterize it as an attempt to ban all grouse shooting, or all game shooting? This can’t be a mistake, or poor phrasing. You make the claim in different forms, which leaves it in no doubt what you are claiming.
Yet the “EVIDENCE” is very clearly that Mark Avery, Chris Packham etc, are only campaigning to ban “driven grouse shooting”. You know very well as an experienced shooter that this is not the only form of grouse shooting, and that therefore you are misrepresenting the facts in the manner of the straw man logical fallacy, to make it easier to argument against your opponents argument. This is a well known and documented tactic of false and dishonest argument.
Explain why you are misrepresenting such basic facts if you are at all concerned with “EVIDENCE”?
The question is why anyone would waste even two minutes of their limited lifespan reading his bullshit after what he posted before. What an a*****e.
A professor of science once told me that those on the losing end of any scientific debate don’t change their position and admit they were wrong (mostly), they just die, and that’s how the debate is settled. Something about people’s inability to change their position.
Exactly, like the rantings of evolution denialists clutching any straw to bolster their argument.
Thanks to the effects of confirmation bias and attitude polarisation, articles like this tend to have the opposite effect of what the author hoped for, ie our existing views are strongly reinforced. As is our determination to do something about it. So, I’d like to thank Tim Bidie for helping our cause.
He doesn’t seem to like the “rude” comments, but has no qualms about insulting the intelligence of everyone here with his unmitigated nitwitery! He shows utter contempt for those who oppose his warped ideals (would he say that the Blue Fox tories are motivated by class hatred?), and utter contempt for our natural heritage, so he richly deserves all the “rude” comments he receives (believe me, I’ve watered down my previous!). In all his staggering arrogance, he deludes himself that he can swing our opinion with such a sorry show of half-truths, old wives tales and good, old-fashioned lies. Either that, or he (in Clarksonesque style) simply writes drivel to incite a reaction. So, up yours, Bidet, and all who practise your foul activities, which are a cancer on the face of our beautiful world!
Mr Bidle has admitted in comments on other sites that the reason he frequents sites like this and the comments section on The Guardian, Mail and Telegraph is that he gains great pleasure from winding up “lefties, veggies and tree-huggers”. He’s clearly not interested in making any substantive contributions to the debate but merely in trolling like an attention-seeking juvenile.
Thanks Mark and thanks to Tim Bidie for offering his views here.
Debate is good.
It can sharpen and cement our point of view, or it can challenge us to see another view point and accept that we may be wrong.
Tim Minchin’s quote is very apt for us all:
“Opinions are like arse-holes, in that everyone has one. There is great wisdom in this… but I would add that opinions differ significantly from arse-holes, in that yours should be constantly and thoroughly examined.
We must think critically, and not just about the ideas of others. Be hard on your beliefs. Take them out onto the verandah and beat them with a cricket bat.
Be intellectually rigorous. Identify your biases, your prejudices, your privilege.”
So, cricket bat in hand I read Tim Bidie’s piece,prepared to reassess my views. However, it took only a fly swat to combat his weak argument.
His argument, like an intensively managed driven grouse moor, does not hold water.
However, I was intrigued by his brief bio. Is it relevant? Maybe. We are made from stories. They shape us and define us. I’m a writer. I like stories. I like to try out different people’s shoes. A person’s story gives their own perspective. One man’s eminent equerry to nobility is another man’s servile, tail-tucked, guard dog of the oppressor. You see, it depends upon your story.
My story? A few generations ago my ancestors were forced out of Scotland in the land clearances, my great grandfather died aged 22 in coal mine as a result of owners who put profit before safety, my grandfather worked in steelworks and rescued a mangy mutt that later saved my father as a teenager when he was washed off the cliffs by a rogue wave and I’ve been brought up to believe that knowledge is power, and to challenge those who make and benefit from the rules. Oh, and in our family, dogs are held in noblest esteem.
So, I suppose we are all shaped and defined by story.
However, I don’t think think this is about class. I think the roots are embedded in wealth, land ownership and power. (Some of which is about class, but not exclusively.)
When the status quo is in someone’s favour, they resist change. The fear of losing control and power is more powerful than the courage it takes to accept and bring about change. (Think, for example, emancipation from slavery or giving women the vote). Fear resides over courage.
So to Tim’s arguments:
1) Birds of prey on the up? Some are. Fantastic to see more red kites and buzzards (despite downward trend over areas for driven grouse moor).
However, the fact remains that unless hen harriers are shot, trapped or poisoned, a grouse moor becomes economically unviable. Therefore, you cannot have driven grouse shooting without illegal persecution. (please don’t try the bluster-argument of brood meddling…it’s a nonsense; an apologist’s strategy for criminal activity and besides, golden eagles, goshawks peregrines, red kites, short eared owls etc etc etc are persecuted too)
2) Data from satellite tags. There has been superb work here both with hen harriers and golden eagles. I don’t think I need to repeat the percentages of birds of prey that ‘disappear’ over driven grouse moors, or the data relating to the reliability of the tags.
All that needs to be said here is; “You can hide the tags, you can hide the bodies, but you can’t hide the pattern.”
3) No prosecutions for the killing of raptors? Have a look at this video of a hen harrier being shot…this didn’t lead to prosecution. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tDWfQJ5U3Nk It throws Tim’s argument out of the window.
4) Land use: For anyone who has truly followed this debate and been engaged with all the arguments understands that the landscape is a key issue here.
Our uplands are devastated landscapes. Devastated by years of use by man. Man hasn’t replaced natural wildfire as Tim suggests. Man has replaced native deciduous woodland with heather moorland, overgrazing and afforestry with non-native cash crop pine. I would agree that a managed moorland is better for some wildlife than overgrazed hillside. But moorland intensively managed for DGS presents a monoculture of heather for the production of grouse, dries out blanket bog and prevents the restoration of mixed wild habitats. Re-wilding our landscapes would give us clean air, clean water, increased carbon capture, connect more people to nature to improve our physical, mental and spiritual health and ultimately provide us with a biodiversity of which we can now only dream. (Incidentally native deciduous woodland would negate fire-risk as it is a low risk habitat and often used as a fire-break because of this)
It’s understandable why there are those that fear change, they are those that fear they have the most to lose. Let’s hope they find the courage within themselves to become a part of that change.
5) Finally…I thought this debate was centred on driven grouse shooting…at least I have answered with reference to this. But Tim mentions hunting,…I am assuming hunting of foxes with dogs…which he suggests to be a class issue.
This is nothing to do with class for me. I happen to like foxes.
But, fox aside, I happen to like dogs too. I suspect Tim loves Bingo, his labradog, very much. I suspect Bingo will live to a very happy ripe old age and become a grey-muzzled old lab with a willing mind and wagging tail, even when his old body is weak. Such fate does not befall the majority of hounds for the hunt. They are destroyed when they are no longer fit for purpose. It is no fitting end for the noblest of creatures.
So I’m afraid Tim’s argument disappointed me. I had hoped for more rigorous debate, but it was not to be.
I suggest Tim Bidie takes on Tim Minchin’s advice and prepares for some serious self-examination.
Gill – wow! Thank you.
Gill, isn’t this class? “I think the roots are embedded in wealth, land ownership and power. (Some of which is about class, but not exclusively.).”
Right wing media make the term in the classic Marxist sense “class struggle” into a dirty word. Whereas simply it is the regulation of the power of the wealthy. So in a sense democracy is Marxist???
Yes…I know what you’re saying…and I was thinking in broad brushstrokes here…but I suppose I was thinking in terms of change…I think there are many visionary people both with, and without wealth and power who can, and are making change happen with regard to conserving and restoring wild habitats for the benefit of all.
Debate is good, but debate, without credible evidence, is so much hot air.
And you have no credible peer reviewed evidence to support your views.
You do not need evidence to point out logical fallacies. It either is a logical fallacy or it isn’t. A couple of points: there are many types of evidence, for example the shooting industry are famously fond of anecdotal evidence. We teach children at GCSE science that peer reviewed scientific journal articles are just one form of evidence, usually quite a good one, but not always. Actually the best form of evidence is seeing something with your own eyes. There are many ways of acquiring indirect evidence, indeed the vast majority of science is based on indirect evidence, indeed seeing something with your own eyes could be argued to be indirect evidence. The most relevant bits of indirect evidence to this discussion is the whereabouts of satellite tagged birds. These studies are ongoing but only a muppet, of the most advanced school of muppetry, would claim that the evidence already published isn’t pretty damning for driven grouse shooting (see https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/hen-harriers-tracking-programme-update).
Indeed Natural England themselves, amongst others, explicitly state that illegal persecution is a MAJOR factor in the decline of Hen Harrier populations, for example (see publications.naturalengland.org.uk/file/81030).
Christopher Graffius of BASC has blogged about this problem (see https://raptorpersecutionscotland.files.wordpress.com/2017/11/christopher-graffius-basc-raptor-persecution-threatens-us-all_nov2017.pdf).
If you are too lazy to look for the evidence it is generally the case that you won’t find it. I explain this to my 3 and 4 year old children on a regular basis but with regards to their toys. If you don’t look you will never find them.
There is basically plenty of evidence. There are also very good grounds for quite wide ranging further studies on all manner of aspects of upland management.
So in the face of the building mountains of evidence, we have a paper about the foodstuffs of Red Kites and YOUR ANECDOTAL EVIDENCE (capitalised to try to make it appear more significant).
3 hen harriers most likely illegally killed over a fifteen year period?
A paper relying on decades old references and rspb papers that the rspb does not even stand behind?
5 keepers a year prosecuted over a 22 year period across all shooting estates?
This is not evidence of grouse shooting having anything to do with any decline in raptor numbers across (all) the uplands of this country: exactly the point that I make above.
Debate without credible evidence is just so much hot air
“3 hen harriers most likely illegally killed over a fifteen year period?”
Indeed, however studies are ongoing and someone need to account for the 73% of tagged birds which are listed as missing, fate unknown, whilst known tag failure rates are around 6%.
“A paper relying on decades old references and rspb papers that the rspb does not even stand behind?”
Time can be an experimental variable. As I explain elsewhere, if you wish to suggest that because it is old it is invalid, you need to explain which of the other experimental variables have altered over time. And I’d say the RSPB do stand by stuff they have published even if they include a standard disclaimer.
“5 keepers a year prosecuted over a 22 year period across all shooting estates?”
Yes indeed, the tip of the iceberg.
“This is not evidence of grouse shooting having anything to do with any decline in raptor numbers across (all) the uplands of this country: exactly the point that I make above.”
Most grouse shooters admit as such. It’s only you that is having difficulty.
“Debate without credible evidence is just so much hot air.”
Only if you’r a grumpy nihilist.
The government tagging paper you cite lists 7 tagged harriers as having been predated, over twice the number of those illegally killed over the same period.
The same paper explains precisely why so many are listed ‘missing, fate unknown’:
Radio tag signals out of range due to small size of study area
Satellite tag not functioning due to location/attitude of dead bird.
The peregrine study I refer to relies on evidence of illegal killing gathered many decades ago.
There were no prosecutions for the illegal killing of raptors in 2016.
The open minded may very well conclude from this that decades old evidence is out of date.
The rspb figures are not peer reviewed, not to be relied upon. They themselves put this slightly differently but the open minded observer will know exactly what their heavy caveat means:
‘However the figures in Birdcrime may vary from other published reports, because data sets compiled for different purposes, using very different methods, are unlikely to be directly comparable. Consequently, there will be some variation in how incidents are recorded, assessed and categorised.’
And, after all, as they say: ‘The views expressed in Birdcrime are not necessarily those of the RSPB or PAW.’
So thank you very much once again for underlining the points that I make above.
“The government tagging paper you cite lists 7 tagged harriers as having been predated, over twice the number of those illegally killed over the same period. The same paper explains precisely why so many are listed ‘missing, fate unknown’: Radio tag signals out of range due to small size of study area. Satellite tag not functioning due to location/attitude of dead bird.”
If however, as I did previously, discard the radio tagging data and take just the satellite tag data (of 59 tagged birds 6 are still alive, 43 are listed as missing fate unknown) that is 81% of birds. Of the recovered birds there is a 3.3:1 ratio of birds dying of natural causes and illegally persecuted birds. So lets just subtract 6% from the 81% to account for tag failures, this leaves 75%. What this looks like is at least 17% of the population being harvested by gamekeepers and the rest dying from natural causes. It’s no wonder the population is struggling.
Now of those missing tags a few of the birds may have pursued Meadow Pipits down rabbit holes, or have died and landed on their backs in deep heather, but what does “Satellite tag not functioning due to location/attitude of dead bird” really mean? Could it be that the bird is dead and a Jay or Red Squirrel has seen the tag, taken it and cached it for later use? Or could it mean its been buried or smashed to smithereens, moved and buried by a gamekeeper who has illegally killed the the bird and sees the need to ensure that the tag or the dead bird are not found on land that they manage?
I freely admit that I do not know what the fate of all those missing birds is. Plain facts though, that of the satellite tagged, dead recovered birds, a massive 33% are illegally persecuted and this is obviously having an impact upon the population, hence they are struggling.
Sir your cherry picking of the data clearly doesn’t work upon closer inspection.
“The peregrine study I refer to relies on evidence of illegal killing gathered many decades ago.”
Yes indeed and the attitudes of the shooting fraternity have evolved since then to some extent, but probably in the wrong direction.
“There were no prosecutions for the illegal killing of raptors in 2016.
The open minded may very well conclude from this that decades old evidence is out of date.”
Yes indeed, time is a dimension over which the evolution of a system can be observed. S’pose we all need to go back to the dark ages and start again, repeating all those alchemy experiments to make lead into gold.
“The rspb figures are not peer reviewed, not to be relied upon. They themselves put this slightly differently but the open minded observer will know exactly what their heavy caveat means:
‘However the figures in Birdcrime may vary from other published reports, because data sets compiled for different purposes, using very different methods, are unlikely to be directly comparable. Consequently, there will be some variation in how incidents are recorded, assessed and categorised.’ And, after all, as they say: ‘The views expressed in Birdcrime are not necessarily those of the RSPB or PAW.'”
Bless.
A small Point that I have missed
“There were no prosecutions for the illegal killing of raptors in 2016.
The open minded may very well conclude from this that decades old evidence is out of date.”
Can you relay for the sake of statistical rigour prosecution rates for raptor persecution in the years surrounding 2016?
He’s not too lazy to look for the evidence Gerald, he’s being willfully blind to it. Anything to muddy the water!
The peer review system exists for a reason.
One of the main reason is that reviewers, who are already experienced and widely read, in their field, can make a judgement as to the originality of the work. ie has it been done before? In this way, they ensure that the only stuff that gets published is stuff that advances science. Otherwise we would still be publishing the attempts of alchemists to turn base metal into gold. You see repeating the same study every 10 years to keep it current is clearly redundant, especially if it produces exactly the same result.
Gill you certainly are a writer. Loved it!
Gill hasn’t “cited a couple of books on basic ecology in support of a ban on shooting” – she offered to supply you with a couple of books on basic ecology in order to help you address your woeful ignorance of ecology which is not at all the same thing. In her first post she refers to various sources of evidence for the persecution of raptors.
The consistent thread running through all of your contributions is your tendency to mis-characterize everything you refer to, whether it is the argument of those you are taking issue with or the ‘evidence’ that you claim supports your case. Whether you are doing this knowingly and willfully or simply because of intellectual limitations we can only speculate.
No need for speculation here. You have misplaced this comment.
Gill references tagging data and a video of an unverifiably identified bird being shot. I, like you, believe the bird to be a hen harrier and would like the perpetrator brought to justice. But would you be prepared for any agency, particularly nongovernmental, to covertly place surveillance equipment in your house, without your permission, in order to watch your every move, just in case?
Notes to the tagging data explain that technology is responsible for so many birds being listed as ‘missing, fate unknown’ and the table produced from the data shows predation killing twice as many birds as illegal killing by humans.
These are exactly the points that I make above.
Thank you.
I agree that I put this comment in the incorrect place. I explained below where it should have gone.
Odd that you should now be pointing out the problem with capturing video evidence of gamekeepers killing hen harriers. I agree! That’s why the number of prosecutions for killing hen harriers doesn’t give any indication of the extent to which the crime actually occurs. Videos such as this one may have been deemed inadmissible as evidence in court because of rules about covert surveillance but they nevertheless demonstrate that the crime took place – something you persist in denying there is any evidence for.
The video does not evidence that any crime took place because the exact species of bird in the video cannot be verified and the video is, in any case, inadmissible.
Any open minded individual would however conclude that a crime had almost certainly been committed.
But that same individual might remark:
‘Although the persecution of raptors is probably at its lowest level
for a very long time, there is no doubt that some gamekeepers continue to ensure that certain species do not prosper on their watch. In theory, they or their landowners could apply for licences for removal, but if they think there is no chance of their applications being favourably considered, they may decide to act outside the law.
So I make a plea for the following: greater flexibility and a more pragmatic approach to law-making, a science-based approach to wildlife management, and a willingness to sanction experimental research, whether it involves the reintroduction of apex predators to control species lower down the food chain or research which provides greater insights into predator prey relationships, disease management and the control of alien species.’
http://charliepyesmith.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/Facts-of-Rural-Life-Final-SinglePages.pdf
You have no credible peer reviewed evidence to support your argument, so any debate is just so much hot air.
This comment is inserted at the wrong place (my fault). It was supposed to be a response to Mr Bidie’s reply to Gill Lewis’ comment below (“Tim, I must urge you to put the spade down and step away from the hole.”).
Find it hard to understand that anyone bothered to respond to the shit he was allowed to spread.He must be laughing with his head up Bingo’s arse.
It is so interesting that it seems to be viewed as a ‘class envy’ issue by some. It may be so for some people, I have no idea.
But I come from Northern Ireland, where ‘class’ really isn’t a thing, nobody thinks about it – certainly not to the extent that I see it in Great Britain. We have our own problems in this wee country of ours.
And yet here I am, as passionate about the protection of wildlife and restoration of a functioning ecology across the UK’s uplands as anyone else.
Place that in one’s pipe and smoke it.
Karl Marx would be crying to hear this.
Thank you all very much, once again, for all the polite comments.
Some of you appear to believe that you deserve more attention than you have received.
But, as I have made clear above, discussion is pointless.
You will just have to wait for another government sufficiently illiberal and short of votes to pander to your prejudices.
For, as with hunting, prejudices they certainly are; they could be nothing else, given the lack of any peer reviewed evidence to support them.
We know this because the only peer reviewed evidence trotted out in front of parliament recently was an outdated paper on peregrines referencing decades old evidence and a report on heather burning whose authors concluded that there was a need for a great deal more research.
Increasing numbers of raptors carry within them the seeds of their subsequent decline as prey species crash. And there is collateral damage, the kestrels that I mention, for example, one of the few British raptors in serious decline.
So, enjoy your bird watching while you still can, devoid of any interest in opportunities for future generations. You will have another illiberal government at some stage and, if you get that which you hope for, the raptors, along with so much else, will all be gone, as they are already in so many landscapes during my lifetime, where no game shooting takes place at all. The hope must be, the likelihood is, that, no doubt like the last one, they will be sufficiently concerned for their longevity, or similarly incompetent, to fudge the matter , as they did with hunting, more popular now than ever.
May the road rise up to meet you.
“Increasing numbers of raptors carry within them the seeds of their subsequent decline as prey species crash. And there is collateral damage, the kestrels that I mention, for example, one of the few British raptors in serious decline.”
All us true conservationists (not those fake ones often seen shooting stuff on grouse moors), naturalists, zoologists amongst others, know that natural fluctuation in population sizes due is a natural event and is something that we don’t bat an eyelid for.
Where we do bat our eyelids is when external influences, direct or indirect such as persistent illegal persecution of raptors, occurs causing massive population crashes.
Tim: “Some of you appear to believe that you deserve more attention than you have received. But, as I have made clear above, discussion is pointless.”
Indeed, you can always take a Nihilist view. Life is pointless, particularly that of a Red Grouse, it seems.
“You will just have to wait for another government sufficiently illiberal and short of votes to pander to your prejudices.”
Yes we already know this. But a new Government looks likely before the end of the year in my judgement, lets just hope so.
“For, as with hunting, prejudices they certainly are; they could be nothing else, given the lack of any peer reviewed evidence to support them.”
There is ample peer reviewed evidence of mega-fauna etc roaming the British landscape (I advise rejecting peer reviewed evidence in this case and going directly to the museum, where you can see the specimens for yourself, with your own eyes). This is the weakest and most unintelligent sentence I have read in the context of this discussion so far. Peer reviewed evidence of what exactly? could you try to be more specific, otherwise you just appear to be a dunderhead.
“We know this because the only peer reviewed evidence trotted out in front of parliament recently was an outdated paper on peregrines referencing decades old evidence and a report on heather burning whose authors concluded that there was a need for a great deal more research.”
Where to start with this sentence??? When you say we, You mean yourself? Again you are quite intellectually sloppy here, can you provide a link to the Hansard page? There is a convention in science and scientific publishing to not repeat the same studies over and over again. If a paper is old and repeated, the study conducted under equivalent condition, the results should be the same. The time dimension is therefore not relevant. However human activity is evolving and therefore the conditions might not be relevant, but you need to specifically state how the conditions have changed and therefore why the study is invalid now. But if you can’t be bothered then surely you are engaging in the wrong activity by blogging about something. Because sloppy and lazy doesn’t look good. If you can’t be arsed to do the reading then so be it.
“Increasing numbers of raptors carry within them the seeds of their subsequent decline as prey species crash. And there is collateral damage, the kestrels that I mention, for example, one of the few British raptors in serious decline.”
What the devil are you saying???? Is their own behaviour as predators a seed of their own decline because they kill their own food???? Are you religious? Is the seed of their own decline a value judgement? Fraid science is much tougher than that, we don’t make value judgements in science. Banning grouse shooting is a value judgement (barren heather monoculture or a rich succession of all things between blanket bog and climax forest) the value judgement being that I like the latter more. And I don’t need peer reviewed evidence for this. It is a value judgement. Just part of the unending pointlessness of everything.
“So, enjoy your bird watching while you still can, devoid of any interest in opportunities for future generations. You will have another illiberal government at some stage and, if you get that which you hope for, the raptors, along with so much else, will all be gone, as they are already in so many landscapes during my lifetime, where no game shooting takes place at all. The hope must be, the likelihood is, that, no doubt like the last one, they will be sufficiently concerned for their longevity, or similarly incompetent, to fudge the matter , as they did with hunting, more popular now than ever. May the road rise up to meet you.”
This is incoherent, were you drunk by this time?
Tim, I must urge you to put the spade down and step away from the hole.
It is getting rather deep.
Instead, pop along to your local library and borrow a couple of books on basic ecology.
There you will discover there is no surprise to hear a larger predator has eaten a smaller one. Such is life, in the most literal sense.
Our problem is man’s impact upon this earth.
(I’m actually surprised to find myself writing this here. I visit lots of schools from nursery upwards and all ages of children know this already!)
‘I thought this debate was centred on driven grouse shooting’
Citing a couple of books on basic ecology in support of a ban on shooting has neatly summed up the point I was trying to make above, with a great deal more concision.
As the man said: ‘Gill you certainly are a writer. Loved it!’
Thank you
“whose authors concluded that there was a need for a great deal more research” – that may well be true! Unfortunately, the state of public funding for science is such that every scientific paper currently ends with a paragraph or two about ‘questions we didn’t answer yet’ – indeed, I have been advised that it would be a Very Bad Idea to write a conclusion suggesting that a conclusive answer has been found to anything. That ‘more research needed’ paragraph provides the justification for the next funding application…
‘….there is currently no clear consensus that existing evidence suggests managed burning alone drives increased DOC concentrations or has negative consequences for C storage….’
‘We would point out that wildfire control and fuel reduction treatments may be important in areas where burning ceases.’
The peatland vegetation burning debate: keep scientific critique in perspective. A response to Brown et al. and Douglas et al.
“But, as I have made clear above, discussion is pointless”.
There is something we can agree on. The only thing you have made clear is that discussion with you is pointless.
‘Last year’s figures show no prosecutions at all for the illegal killing of raptors in 2016’
Clear intended implication, in context with the previous paragraph, is that there were no persecution incidents.
That’s like saying if the police didn’t catch the burglar, then your house wasn’t burgled.
The whole piece is filled with such statements and inaccuracies – ‘Lack of prey species’ is another example – when in fact it’s the exact opposite. Raptor’s prey on red Grouse, their numbers have been proven to increase (Langholm study) and the reason why they are killed.
Gill, your family’s history might be of interest to the motion picture industry.
I’m very grateful to all the people who have responded cogently and often at length to Tim’s nonsense. I’m actually feeling slightly guilty that I haven’t joined them in trying to counter his assertions line by line.
But I have wasted too much of my life arguing with young earth creationists, climate change deniers and other flat-earth types to want to spend more time in this way. I’ve just come across a quote from Mark Twain (always a good source for a pithy quote) that seems appropriate:
“Never argue with stupid people, they will drag you down to their level and then beat you with experience.”
Why not listen to the real experts?
‘I first started studying Hen Harriers on Skye in 2000, so now have 16 breeding seasons under my belt…….Social media is currently alive with debate about the threats facing Hen Harriers, almost exclusively targeted at gamekeepers and estates. There are no human threats to Hen Harriers on Skye. The threats are natural and the weather may also be a factor. Whilst there are threats elsewhere on grouse moors, Hen Harriers have bred in many areas in the west of Scotland not managed for shooting, and here their breeding success can be very mixed. Sometimes I wish the cyberspace experts would get off their arses and spend some time in the field.’
A Birding Guide to the Isle of Skye
‘Stopping management for grouse has been suggested as a means of improving the fortunes of Hen Harriers (Thompson 2009). However, although this would remove the main proximal constraint on populations in some areas, it might not translate straightforwardly into increases in Hen Harrier populations. In areas currently dominated by grouse-moor, a shift to alternative land uses such as forestry, high-density stocking with sheep or deer or wind energy development could diminish the value of the land for harriers by decreasing food availability or nesting success (e.g. Wilson et al. 2012, Wilson et al. 2017).’
BTO
‘Overall, in the Republic, the outlook is not good. There has been a recorded 15% decline in confirmed breeding pairs in the last 5yrs; a 33% breeding population decline in all areas studied in every national quinquennial survey over last 15yrs; and, a 52% decline in estimated breeding pairs over the last 40yrs. During that timeframe, over 300,000 hectares (ha) of peatland have been planted with non-native conifer plantation monoculture.’
‘In addition to forestry, Hen Harrier are under threat from wind farm developments (habitat loss, displacement, and disturbance); illegal and uncontrolled burning of nest and roost sites (requirement to remove suitable Hen Harrier habitat in order to be eligible for and to maximise farm payments); and, disturbance of nest sites through peat extraction.’
Ireland’s Harrier Crisis – Ryan Wilson-Parr
That is the alternative future for our uplands and our ground nesting birds, including hen harriers, if driven grouse shooting is banned.
Indeed, your only valid point. However Gove bless him, promises to deliver environmental services as a condition of subsidy. Sure much needs to be done to try to prevent people from wrecking the environment and restoring it in many places. The last 50 years of intensifying driven grouse shooting prove it.
Exmoor National Park and elsewhere offer incentives for habitat improvements.
Few, if any, ground nesting birds are left on Exmoor, wiped out by predation in my lifetime, so very few raptors are now left there either, prime hen harrier habitat, but no prey left for them, outcompeted.
Why not read the paper on the fate of hen harriers in The Republic of Ireland?
The Republic promises ‘environmental services as a condition of subsidy’ as well.
‘In the Republic of Ireland, the home of the Hen Harrier is everywhere disappearing before the eyes of a generation, planted, cut to pieces, extracted, scorched to cinder, mowed down, ploughed under, and replaced. It is an ecological disaster of magnitude. The situation is desperate. Just 108 confirmed pairs at the last count.’ Ryan Wilson-Parr
Welcome to your future.
“In the Republic of Ireland, the home of the Hen Harrier is everywhere disappearing before the eyes of a generation, planted, cut to pieces, extracted, scorched to cinder, mowed down, ploughed under, and replaced. It is an ecological disaster of magnitude. The situation is desperate. Just 108 confirmed pairs at the last count.’ Ryan Wilson-Parr
Welcome to your future.”
Exactly my point and thank you for banging the drum for much stricter compliance rules for land management subsidies.
Thank you for your honesty:
‘….the best bit comes at the end with a series of quotes used to argue that banning driven grouse shooting is essentially class war. I openly admit that politically I am an Anarcho-Marxist, recognising the importance of Marx as a forerunner in a scientific analysis of history (if that could ever be achieved really).’
Land management subsidy has the same problem as all your other quack nostrums…….eventually running out of other people’s money.
Private land management subsidy in the uplands, on the other hand, eventually runs out of the owners own money.
You seem to be batting for the wrong side.
Yes, which is why so many ex-privately educated, city hedge fund managers invested so heavily in grouse moors, in the last few decades.
So you are saying what? Is current subsidy for the uplands sufficient or not?
No public subsidy is ever enough.
That is why marxist leninism is so hopelessly impractical.
Private subsidy is the way forward for the uplands, always has been, always will be, as the appalling situation in the Irish Republic that I note above so amply demonstrates.
How to make a small fortune out of a Scottish Highlands estate?
Start with a large fortune……boom boom.
Actually I think you personally have made a very good case for nationalising grouse moors. The problem with being a Troll, is that you polarise opinion. I do not care one iota if the lands of the uber-wealthy were confiscated by the state, for the common good.
In fact, I would probably get my equivalent of “that warm glow inside, when you kill something,” when reading the bleeding heart, sob stories in the Telegraph, of the landed gentry dispossessed of their lands.
What I really find funny though, is how you state with prescient certainty that you are capable of seeing the outcome of a evolving land management practices. There clearly are areas (mainly driven grouse moors) that have become fire wrecked, but on the other hand there are some very successful agrienvironmental schemes.
Or not really:
‘The story of agri-environment since 2005 has been one of tragically unfulfilled potential.’
https://anewnatureblog.wordpress.com/2017/09/04/guest-blog-agri-environment-a-need-for-detailed-scrutiny-by-steve-peel/
The indictment is severe on Exmoor:
‘It is unhelpful when criteria for assessing SSSI biological condition are changed, having led to a decline of moorland in favourable condition from 34 per cent to 10 per cent between 2002 and 2014.’
https://www.exmoorsociety.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/Exmoor_Moorland_Report_2016.pdf
That, and massive gorse, wildfire burns, is, effectively the future after grouse shooting; red and black grouse both gone from Exmoor (and waders, hen harriers, merlin) in my lifetime.
Enjoy.
No Harriers on intensively managed grouse moors either. Well there are, until they get shot.
But besides this I fully agree that subsidy and the delivery of environmental services don’t go nearly far enough and we are all aware of the step-wise erosion of habitats. Locally, a few fields each year, drained, ploughed up for ryegrass. Hedges are still being pulled up and trees felled at an alarming rate. So yes, it isn’t working.
There are places however, that receive environmental stewardship subsidy, where there are a reasonable variety of living things. That these places too are becoming isolated, I find particularly alarming.
Part of the solution, a small part is to ban intensive grouse moor management. Also a complete shake up of the subsidy system, linked to delivery of environmental services, with strict compliance regulations, adequate monitoring and inspection.
At the end of the day everyone else has to do mountains of paperwork in order to get their money, why not land managers too?
We know exactly what happens when game keepering ceases, ground nesting bird numbers, including hen harriers crash, as in Ireland, Langholm and elsewhere.
On the other hand:
‘Sixteen shooting estates, covering a total of 325,000 acres, are now taking part in a project to help protect hen harriers in Scotland, volunteering to place monitoring cameras on their land in order to protect hen harrier nests as part of the ‘Heads up for harriers’campaign.’
‘Many estates helped surveyors from RSPB and the Scottish Raptor Study Groups to carry out the 2016 UK hen harrier survey for which results were announced in June,”
The Scottish Farmer
Whereas in England it is not possible for the Hen Harrier population to crash to a lower level.
Exactly how intensively managed are those 325,000 acres of grouse moors participating in the Heads up for Hen Harrier Project? If they are not intensively managed this detracts from your argument.
So, who is your ‘expert’ on the Hen Harriers of Skye?
Mr Bidet shoots himself in the foot once again.
“Hen Harriers have bred in many areas in the west of Scotland not managed for shooting, and here their breeding success can be very mixed.”
Even “very mixed” is a damn sight better than zero.
Thank you very much for underlining, once again, the points that I make above.
The final sentence of the quote you refer to was no doubt written specifically for you.
You don’t make any points, Mr Bidet. All you do is copy/paste paragraphs out of context which you think adds weight to your non-existent argument. But, by all means, keep digging. Each ridiculous comment from you strengthens our cause.
There is an excellent summary of the current state of play in the countryside here, well worth a read:
‘Although the persecution of raptors is probably at its lowest level
for a very long time, there is no doubt that some gamekeepers continue to
ensure that certain species do not prosper on their watch. In theory, they
or their landowners could apply for licences for removal, but if they think
there is no chance of their applications being favourably considered, they
may decide to act outside the law.
So I make a plea for the following: greater flexibility and a more pragmatic
approach to law-making, a science-based approach to wildlife management,
and a willingness to sanction experimental research, whether it involves
the reintroduction of apex predators to control species lower down
the food chain or research which provides greater insights into predatorprey
relationships, disease management and the control of alien species.’
http://charliepyesmith.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/Facts-of-Rural-Life-Final-SinglePages.pdf
“In theory, they or their landowners could apply for licences for removal, but if they think there is no chance of their applications being favourably considered, they
may decide to act outside the law”.
So in other words if we just allowed gamekeepers to kill hen harriers the problem of illegal killing of hen harriers wouldn’t exist! Those poor gamekeepers turned into criminals by a society that wont let them by-pass inconvenient laws!
As I mention above, bad law breeds contempt for the law, but the writer is simply recommending more flexibility in the granting of licences.
Noting the difficulties by commentators above with credible evidence, why not have a look at the most recent statistics from Scottish Natural Heritage?
‘Seventeen species contribute to the upland bird indicator, and of these, ten have shown significant long term declines’
‘Long-term changes in upland bird populations have been driven by a number of factors including climate, forest expansion, changes in grazing and other site based management such as predator control (Buchanan et al., 2017)’
‘The kestrel population continues to decline, with the recent 61% decline reducing the population to its lowest point since the BBS began, at 85% below the 1994 value. The cause of the long-term decline in kestrels could be related to changes in prey availability (for example declines in farmland passerines, small mammals and macro-invertebrates) and competition with increased numbers of larger avian predators (Hoy et al., 2017). The short-term decline is consistent with anecdotal reports of low vole
availability in 2016.’
So, long term decline of many upland species across the uplands, competition between abundant raptors and a shortage of voles, all of which explain declining numbers of raptors across the uplands, a decline that will only accelerate as foxes, mustelidae, corvids outcompete raptors if driven grouse shooting is banned. Raven populations by the way have doubled in numbers since 1994.
The vole is of course an important prey species for the hen harrier.
There is plenty of credible evidence available, but it does not support a ban on driven grouse shooting.
“So, long term decline of many upland species across the uplands, competition between abundant raptors and a shortage of voles, all of which explain declining numbers of raptors across the uplands, a decline that will only accelerate as foxes, mustelidae, corvids outcompete raptors if driven grouse shooting is banned. Raven populations by the way have doubled in numbers since 1994.
The vole is of course an important prey species for the hen harrier.
There is plenty of credible evidence available, but it does not support a ban on driven grouse shooting.”
Yes indeed, raptors like other things in a changing world have to deal with various fluxes. However for the Hen Harrier, on top of this according to Natural England’s crudest figures, an additional unknown percentage (17 to 40%) of the population are harvested by gamekeepers to protect driven grouse stocks for shooting.
‘An additional unknown percentage……..’
It’s the way you tell ’em………..
Indeed, directly from Natural England’s own data, somewhere between 17 and 75 % of Hen Harriers are harvested by gamekeepers. I will give you that, out of a sample of 9 recovered birds birds which give a value of 33%, the statistical rigour of the data is somewhat weak, but you don’t seem to have a problem with dodgy statistics, so I will leave it as it is.
Also the lower value (17 %) of that estimated proportion is calculated on a error in the initial ratio calculations. The more realistic vale is 25 % (ie 33 % of 75 %), as mentioned also given the small sample size to derive the 33 %. It was your enthusiasm however, for cherry-picking statistics out of tables of data, which caused me to do the calculation though and your willingness to accept cherry-picked statistics in bolstering up your argument.
The scientific way is to be much more cautious with your assertions based on not statistically rigorous data (small sample sizes etc). As I have explained, it’s best to wait for the full data to be actually published from the Hen Harrier tagging studies.
And for rigour, you should also state all your assumptions.
Hen harrier first year mortality in Ireland is 72%, no driven grouse shooting. Hen harriers are tagged in their first year.
Not that different to the England according to NE figures (66 %), so in Ireland 28% survive the first year. Where these surviving birds do not settle on driven grouse moors, they can then go on to produce offspring. In England they are generally exterminated by gamekeepers.
As you say: ‘An additional unknown percentage……’
Unknown because entirely unevidenced.
You are making it up as you go along.
That is an out and out lie.
Any numbers given are easily derived from Natural England’s own satellite tagging studies, just download the spreadsheet and do the sums. Free for anyone to see (https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/hen-harriers-tracking-programme-update)
‘….an additional unknown percentage (17 to 40%) of the population are harvested by gamekeepers to protect driven grouse stocks for shooting’
That ‘unknown percentage’ does not come from tagging data, does it?
You just made up the bit about the gamekeepers.
The tagging data is precise and shows that hen harriers face a variety of threats from natural predators. Of the 158 tracked, only 2% are listed as having been ‘persecuted’ over a tracking period of 15 years, a tiny proportion annually…..on which you wish to force through a change in legislation to ban driven grouse shooting, a profound change to property rights.
You will have to wait for the next illiberal and incompetent government to come along, and, as the man said, in the long run we are all dead.
Well, the dangers of the misuse of statistics. If you go cherry picking and someone does it back to you, don’t start acting all hurt and disgruntled. I have explained my use of statistics above and indeed why cherry picking data is not statistically robust, including applied to how I derived the numbers I quoted. I begin to doubt your ability to understand this though. My advice about short term memory loss still stands.
Resorting to insults invariably indicates the wrong end of the argument.
Resorting to insults??? Anyway, if I have insulted you, isn’t it clearly a logical fallacy that “invariably,” the person who uses the insult is wrong. say for example if my neighbour killed my chicken and I phoned the police and said, “my murderous neighbour has just killed my bird.” because I had insulted them, by calling them murderous, does that mean that they didn’t kill the chicken?
Are you sure you’re not Aunt Sally in disguise?
“As I mention above, bad law breeds contempt for the law,”
The law protecting wild birds is not bad law (at least not in the sense that you mean – given the decline of many bird species there is a case for making it a good deal tougher). As applied to the hen harrier the protection is particularly justified. It would be bad law to permit gamekeepers to shoot hen harriers given that their population in England has been driven to the point of extinction and in Scotland significantly reduced. It is absurd to suggest that more flexibility in the granting of licences to bump hen harriers off would in any way contribute to the conservation of the species.
Bad law undoubtedly does breed contempt for the law and parliament has clearly taken this on board in restating its support for driven grouse shooting.
Law made to protect scarce species clearly requires review when those species are no longer scarce and threaten the survival of other species.
The hen harrier would fare a great deal better if, along with all other ground nesting birds, it was not predated by foxes, mustelidae, corvids, other raptors, disturbed by all and sundry, no doubt with the best of intentions etc etc
“The hen harrier would fare a great deal better if, along with all other ground nesting birds, it was not predated by foxes, mustelidae, corvids, other raptors, disturbed by all and sundry, no doubt with the best of intentions etc etc”
Allowing yourself to make airy assertions with no peer-reviewed evidence for them eh Mr Bidie? You are a one. Those barons at Runnymede will be revolving in their graves in dismay.
Funny how those predators of ground nesting birds you mention are heavily controlled on grouse moors but the Hen Harrier just doesn’t “do a great deal better” on those moors isn’t it?
DEFRA 2015 press release:
https://www.gov.uk/government/news/hen-harrier-breeding-season-set-to-be-most-successful-for-5-years
Breakdown by results and land ownership:
http://www.smallholdersworld.uk/grouse-moors-fledge-more-hen-harriers-than-other-areas-this-year/
All the peer reviewed evidence is cited within the joint action plan to increase the English hen harrier population.
Regarding hen harrier predation by foxes, see Hen Harriers on Skye, 2000 – 2012: nest failures and predation.
Regarding hen harrier breeding success near grouse moors, they sometimes do rather better there than when supervised by the rspb.
Government figures for 2015 showed the RSPB’s lack of success in contributing to that year’s hen harrier numbers, with all but one of the seven nests over which the charity had primary control failing.
The figures, released by Defra in response to a question in the House of Lords, showed there were 12 hen harrier nesting attempts in England that year. Six were successful, of which four were on, or immediately adjacent to, moorland with grouse shooting interests, and six failed.
The number of breeding attempts was a marked 300% increase on 2014, when there were just four breeding attempts. Five of the twelve nests were monitored either by local raptor workers or a combination of organisations including Natural England and the Forestry Commission, and with the full cooperation of the private landowners all were successful in fledging chicks.
However of the remaining seven nests monitored by the RSPB, one of which was on their own land, six failed.
Tim Bidie – no, that’s just not true is it?
Thank you very much, Mark, once again, for giving space to a contrary view on your blog.
And thank you very much to all the lovely polite commentators, whose company I have enjoyed whilst on holiday in Cyprus, surrounded by peregrines, goshawks, rock partridge, egrets and much else.
More meaningless codswallop. Keep ’em coming.
Was this guest blog originally due on April 1st but published early?
If the cap fits…….