Rebecca, Ruth and I had a chat at the Bird Fair.
In this month’s Birdwatch there is an excellent article on raptor persecution by Ruth Tingay as well as a host of excellent images of rare birds from the UK and elsewhere in Europe. I enjoyed Bill Oddie’s back-page column too.
In my Political Birder column I praise Waitrose for starting to go lead-free with its game meat, and slag off the government for not doing anything themselves. Each month my column gives readers a suggestion of something to do – in September it would be good to write to other supermarkets and ask them what their line is on feeding poisonous lead to their customers in game meat when Waitrose are moving to supply lead-free meat.
No doubt the RSBP will be asking you both for permission to publish these articles in the next ‘Natures Home’.
And if you’re in the north west write to Booths; their Twitter has been tweeting the following in response to enquiries about the grouse they stock:
“Booths sell red grouse in season & source birds through one vetted supplier, Furness Fish & Game in Cumbria. The supplier only stocks grouse from estates carefully & professionally managed by respected gamekeepers. Conservation of traditional moorlands, native grouse stocks & the wider bird population, to include hen harriers, alongside other moorland birds such as lapwig, curlew & plover that thrive on managed moorland, is of upmost importance to Booths.”
It’s not often you see the words “carefully”, “professionally” and “respected” used to describe grouse keepers!
Up here in Scotland local food banks and homeless charities have been accepting pheasant breasts from the Estates. I’ve written to them to tell them about the ethical and health concerns but their replies have been shocking – they say that they do it infrequently so it’s acceptable!?!
This was the reply from Tesco:
Still waiting a reply from Morrisons, Asda and Sainsbury’s who are waiting for their buyers to respond.
“Hi Chris,
Thank you so much for your email. I hope you’re doing well today.
I am so sorry for the delay in getting in replying back to your email. We’re experiencing a high volume of emails which has delayed our response times.
Tesco’s speciality meat and game is reared to high standards of quality and animal welfare. At Tesco, we do not sell any branded game meat and none of the game meat we sell are shot.
Thank you again for taking the time out to email us about this. If there is any issues like this then please don’t hesitate to email us. Either I or one of my colleagues will be more than happy to help further.
I hope you don’t mind in receiving as survey. This is based on my performance and it would be helpful if you could fill this out for me.
Take care and I hope you have a wonderful weekend.
Kind regards
Ameena Vindhani
Tesco Customer Service
Tesco Customer Engagement Centre”