From the Scottish government: Our Reference: 202000070343Your Reference: Another poisoned eagle Dear Dr Mark Avery, Thank you for your correspondence received on 29/07/2020. Your query will be passed to the relevant area for consideration and has been given a reference number of 202000070343. Please quote this number in all correspondence. The Scottish Government aim to…
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In the garden
In the garden this afternoon filming a chat for Hen Harrier Day online on Saturday.
This petition is flying – Decathlon
For more information see the petition itself and this article from The Ferret. To see what Decathlon themselves say, here is their Twitter account on this subject; Decathlon look as though they are generally a force for quite a lot of good in the world – see here – and so I was inclined to…
Pallids in Pas-de-Calais
I’m interested in Pallid Harriers for a number of reasons; they are very beautiful birds, they are expanding their range dramatically westwards in an interesting manner and I have a bet with my friend Ben Koks (which I will be happy to lose) that Pallids aren’t going to have bred in the UK by the…
Let’s hope not
I hope this cartoon by Mr Carbo is unnecessarily pessimistic. It remains to be seen whether the SNP government is prepared to act on wildlife crime and unsustainable moorland management. They have acted on Mountain Hares but if they thought that was enough then they have not read the mood of the Scottish electorate nor…
It’s the silly season on the grouse moors
This piece in The National is a hoot. You can always spot dodgy pseudo-science when something is aiming to ‘prove’ something rather than to investigate it. And in this case gamekeepers are going to collect data on birds of prey on grouse moors. Quite what all this is about, who knows? We know birds of…
Dear First Minister – what you told Nicola Sturgeon (2)
Yes, back to that poisoned White-tailed Eagle found on a grouse moor in a National Park. Why? Because it’s just as shocking and awful this week as it was last week. Nicola Sturgeon and Roseanna Cunningham may feel that they had a bit of a torrid time on this subject last week but, after the…
News from the grousers
Crispin Odey, grouse shooter and funder of You Forgot the Birds (logo any harrier except a Hen) seems like a lovely man. Craig Whitaker MP for Calder Valley whose constituency is often flooded by water pouring off grouse moors, and who spoke in favour of driven grouse shooting in the 2016 debate seems like a…
Just saying…
The GWCT are badgering me to buy a badge of their logo to support their vital conservation work for the Grey Partridge. That’s a more than 50% decline since 1994. Somebody’s not been buying enough badges? This is the GWCT’s best-studied species, by far, I’d say. Now the conservation of widespread farmland species is difficult,…
Riches not beyond measure
I got this from Pelagic last week. Most publishers do this, they have a minimum amount under which they don’t pay you the royalties earned in a period but carry it over to next time. And I’m not complaining, and certainly not about Pelagic because they pay royalties every six months whereas most publishers pay…