The issue of the droppings of 60 million released gamebirds was not one that was large in my mind when I started thinking about Pheasants and Red-legged Partridges but that is because I am a blinkered ornithologist.
What has emerged (see previous blog) is that those droppings are a great threat to many habitats: while one end of a Pheasant may be gobbling up an Adder the other end may be depositing the equivalent of a rich fertiliser on the Adder’s habitat.
If there is anyone out there who would like to help calculate the weight of droppings concerned and the amount of N, P and K they represent then I’d be very grateful.
Most SSSIs would ban or limit the amount of fertiliser that could be applied to the site but Pheasants leave their fertiliser behind them. Good job there aren’t many of them and their numbers aren’t increasing! Except we know there are tens of millions and their numbers keep increasing.
I am told that the general rule for Pheasants is that 1000 Pheasants are fed 6 tonnes of grain after release and during the shooting season. So that’s about 300,000 tonnes of grain. And there are RLPs too – let’s call it 325,000 tonnes.
At cereal yields of 9t/ha that’s say, 35,000 ha of cereal land (350km2), or a square of 17km x 17km (or 11miles x 11 miles) all cereal, no hedges. Good use of land? Or maybe rewilding, tree planting or even producing food for people would be a better use.
Or it seems to be an area about the size of Glasgow – now there’s a thought…
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Whatever.
You have been outmanouvered, and dancing around on pin heads, apparently.
Trapit – so I gather, but one mustn’t be distracted by noises off.
Or look at it another way that is 325,000 tonnes that U.K. farmers sold which might not have been sold, that help our farmers to make a profit and keep farming, producing other crops to feed us.
john – you really are straining credulity there. Without those Pheasants farmers’ children will go hungry may be your next line, I guess.
That’s a really odd argument John. You seem to be suggesting that UK farmers need to sell 325,000 tonnes of wheat to feed Pheasants in order to take the profit to plant more wheat in order to feed people. This appears to be some sort of crazy agricultural Ponzi scheme. Are you serious?
That’s one enormous pile of shit. (And I don’t just mean the literal shit.) What an appalling burden on an overburdened planet! What does a pile of 325,000 tonnes of grain look like? The Albert Hall? The O2?
And there must be figures (or informed estimates) out there for how much a bird of a pheasant’s size excretes per day. As you say, the weight of that pile of crap, and it’s NPK equivalent would be well worth estimating.
And it’s not (mostly) going anywhere useful like on a field either, but onto valuable habitats which should be low nutrient, and washed into streams & rivers.
For the 325KT guestimate: 9t/Ha average would be UK wheat. If barley were included this would be ~8t/Ha & the area cropped would be approaching 41KHa, or ~1.4% of the UK cereal cropped area. Is this True?
I don’t know whether the supplementary feed for flying targets would be human food-quality stuff or outgrades from grain processors. Modern combines dump less grain back on to the stubble so much of the tailcorn will be in the bulk and will be graded-out at some point in the chain – everything has a value. In the past a mill manager would sell extractor dust and sweepings from the warehouse floor as animal feed filler, which would include concrete dust so possibly appropriate for Pheathered Phucks.
The amount of land, fertiliser and crop protection inputs required globally to feed all non-food animals kept or supported by humans as companions, for entertainment and to facilitate gambling is sufficient to Boggle Minds. Let the Whataboutery begin.