Dear Mr Pursglove Just a quick note to say that I’d like to draw your attention to a debate on a successful petition that will take place in Westminster Hall at 4.30pm on Monday 14 March. It’s title is Ban the shooting of badgers immediately and it received over 106,000 signatures and so it has…
Author: Mark
Born Bristol, UK
Educated: Cleeve House School Bristol, Bristol Grammar School and Downing College Cambridge
Ph.D. University of Aberdeen, Winter activity of pipistrelle bats.
NERC post-doctoral Research Fellow, Edward Grey Institute, Oxford University
Former Conservation Director of the RSPB, 1989-2011
British Birds, March 2022
A cracking issue of British Birds this month (as almost every month) with an attractive Common Scoter on the cover alerting the reader to a fascinating paper (Metcalf, Bradnum, Dunning and Lees) inside describing overland nocturnal migration of this duck across Britain revealed partly by the new nocmig technology. Aren’t birds brilliant? It’s almost time…
My mate Putin
A friend recently sent me a link with the pithy note saying that he was surprised that I was such mates with Vladimir Putin and that he hoped I would use my best endeavours to get him to pull the tanks out of Ukraine. Of course, I’ll do all I can on that front but…
Alternatives to driven grouse shooting
This paper is a mixture of the completely obvious and the quite important. It takes the oft-quoted suggestion by pro-grouse-shooting interests, that the only real alternative land uses to intensive driven grouse shooting are harmful agriculture and harmful afforestation, and says that isn’t true. It clearly isn’t, because what happens in terms of land use…
The man underneath the hat
Wild Justice has recently started subscribing to The Shooting Times – just to have a look at what they are saying. So, every Thursday an issue arrives at my home. When I saw this week’s cover I thought to myself ‘Yet another shooter getting out of his depth’ but I thought there was something familiar…