Farming Today went back this morning to their not entirely accurate story from yesterday about the RSPB having a look at its policy on game shooting. Apart from the repetition of Martin Harper’s out-of-date ‘up to 50 million gamebirds’ (figure from GWCT is now 47m Pheasants and 10m Red-legged Partridges which is a long way past 50m) they threw in a few listeners’ views.
Lovely to hear the views of Alistair Balmain, ex editor of Shooting Times mentioned as though he were just another listener.
But Caroline Bedell of BASC was interviewed and she avoided any intemperance or lashing out at the RSPB. And what she said made quite a lot of sense. Have a listen here after about 9 minutes. BASC is very unpredictable in its public pronouncements – it is the shooting organisation most likely to say something sensible, but often says things that are daft. If shooting is changing, it is likely to come through BASC rather than the Moorland Association, GWCT or Countryside Alliance (for heaven’s sake!), but those who might well regard BASC as a potential good guy need to see it keep to the sensible, moderate line more consistently if they are to trust that change is in the air.
Although, to be fair, when Caroline said that there were guidelines from the GWCT for stocking densities of released Pheasants but that some people might not follow them she could have said what my British Birds paper on Pheasants says (relying on GWCT published data);
…the GWCT recommended that ‘detrimental effects on specialist
British Birds 112, July 2019, pp372-389 (this quote from p380).
woodland invertebrates would be minimised if releasing was conducted at the recommended density of 700 birds/ha’ (Neumann et al. 2015). However, average stocking densities
are much higher than that, at 1,800 birds/ha and sometimes at densities as high as 8,000 birds/ha (Sage et al. 2005)
Anyone who’d like a copy of my British Birds paper will be sent one if they send an amail to [email protected] with PHEASANT as the title of the email.
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I don’t pay the wages of any Fieldsports society employee any more (nor RSPB), but if Caroline Bedell honestly believes in what she was saying, and sticks to her guns over this, she is going to earn her money this next few years.
Farm shoots ?, that phrase kept annoying me, though I suppose it was all they were interested in.
Although, to be fair, those densities refer to the stocking of release pens. I think people would notice if it referred to estate-wide densities – 8000 birds/ha is 1 bird for every 1.25m2, a square of side 1.12m.
I imagine that 50 million pheasants are going to be gobbling up a hell of a lot of our native flora and fauna!
How that can be looked upon as positive is very hard to see.
There’s a similarly sane article by David Tomlinson reproduced on the RPUK website which points out how shooting has become industrialised – and a response from a certain Mr Osborne saying that its fine to release as many birds as you can afford. And therein, surely, lies the rub – this is not a static situation – shooting has changed dramatically over the last 20-30 years from could be described as a ‘sport’ into a full blown industry, measured like anything in the City simply by the numbers.