Guest blog – Bowland and its lack of raptors by Terry Pickford

I have been involved with monitoring and protecting raptors, in particular the Peregrine beginning 1967, when the North West Raptor Group was established, then only 7 active territories remained in the North West England. In the 1980s I located the first ground nesting pair of Peregrines close to the A6 on Shap. Field work began…

What you think – rewilding and grouse shooting

Readers of this blog, and its author, are keen on rewilding (below)… …and not very keen on grouse shooting…. These two things are not completely interdependent of course, but less land given over to intensive grouse shooting would allow more chance of rewilding of our uplands. I’ll be writing more about this next week.  But…

45,000

Yesterday we passed another major milestone – 45,000 signatures.  Our e-petition has plenty of momentum. In May we passed 34k, 35k, 36k, 37k and 38k signatures, but already in June we have passed 39k, 40k, 41k, 42k, 43k, 44k and 45k – how much further can we get before the end of this month? And…

You can’t have both – you have to choose.

Let’s just stick with Hen Harriers for a while – I’ll come back to wider environmental issues next week. And as far as Hen Harriers and driven grouse shooting go – you can’t have both, you have to choose. Ever since the results of the first Langholm study (see Chapter 3 of Inglorious and here)…

#Brexit people include…

Here is a list of #Brexit supporters colour-coded by whether I normally feel warm or feel cool to their views (and, fair enough, sometimes I had to flip a coin to decide):   Ian Botham Sol Campbell Keith Chegwin Iain Duncan Smith Bernie Ecclestone Nigel Farage Julian Fellowes Liam Fox Zac Goldsmith Michael Gove Kate…