Are you coming to the Bird Fair in August? Come on the Friday and you can attend a debate on whether we should ban driven grouse shooting with myself and the leader of the Green Party, Natalie Bennett on one side and a representative of the GWCT on the other with, we very much hope,…
Category: EVENTS: BirdFair, HHDay, Game Fair etc
This brought a tear to my eye
Hi Mark, I have just read your recent blog on the Peak District and the National Trust, and I am afraid it has made me cry. I think they are partly tears of sorrow and partly of hope against hope that what you write about could be true. I love the Peak District. It is…
Bit of a round up
I’ll be at Housmans bookshop this evening at 7pm Fineshade Wood features in this week’s Private Eye the NFU voted to be pro Remain in the EU referendum the Defra Press Office has not got back to me with an answer on whether ministers sign off responses to e-petitions my MP has not yet got…
Excellent BAWC conference
The second BAWC conference was even better than the excellent first one. Many thanks to the organisers and the sponsors (RSPB, Rare Bird Alert and League Against Cruel Sports) for doing such a great job. Henry is pictured above on board the SS Great Britain as the conference venue was right next to Brunel’s iron…
Country strife from HoT
We all know that Philip Merricks loves the Hen Harrier as he has been photographed in London cuddling up to one, and so it comes as no surprise that he descibes the bird as ‘magnificent’ in his article in Country Life praising the feckless Defra Hen Harrier non-plan (Is this the glorious solution? 2 March,…
2015 – a bad year for driven grouse shooting
Few Red Grouse were shot in the UK this year, mainly because of disease and bad weather. But regardless of grouse bags, this was a very bad year for driven grouse shooting and hastened the end of this worthless hobby. The case against driven grouse shooting is that it depends on intensive management that involves…
Glorious (by Tim Wootton)
You are running out of time to visit the SWLA exhibition in the Mall Galleries, but you still have Friday, Saturday and until 1pm on Sunday. If you turn up there you might be struck by this lovely painting (or four of them) by Orkney-based artist Tim Wootton. Entitled Glorious, Tim tells me that it…
Bye bye Game Fair
I regret the passing of the Game Fair as I’ve had quite a lot of fun there over the years. But it was very obvious this year that there weren’t many folk around on the Friday at least. But Henry enjoyed his first, and apparently only, visit, very much (Henry’s Game Fair, 2 August). I…
Henry was at the Bird Fair
When Henry was at the Bird Fair last weekend he had a satellite tag fitted to him. You can see that the tag correctly located Henry in Rutland, and correctly located him at the right end of Rutland Water, and correctly mapped his flights around the Bird Fair marquees. You can see how detailed…
More Bird Fair reflections
Continued from yesterday… 4. The Food and Drink Things changed this year and the main, central, ‘foodhall’ area was completely different. Several outlets selling noodles, burgers, fish and chips, churros, bacon baps etc. I can’t say I sampled them all – nothing like! – but what I did have was pretty good. I’d say,…