Standing up for Nature
Do you ever listen to Book at Bedtime on Radio 4 between 1045pm and 11pm? I do, although the fact that it is around my bedtime usually means that I fall asleep before 11pm and get snatches of the story on a few nights a week! But it opens my ears, temporarily, to books that…
I’ve been catching up on Pheasant rearing techniques now that the Pheasant shooting season has ended. There are four Pheasant-rearing facilities which are under Defra special measures in Lancashire at the moment, at three of which H5N8 bird flu has been detected. Defra keep using this phrase ‘There are links between them that pose a…
There has been another outbreak of bird flu in another turkey farm in Lincolnshire and another in another Pheasant farm in Lancashire. We are told that bird flu is widespread in wild birds across the country and yet the cases affecting farms are well and truly clumped around commercial farms in two discrete but well-separated…
Bird flu has been confirmed in a Pheasant ‘farm’ near Preston, Lancashire says Defra. The Pheasant is a non-native species which is reared in captivity in the UK and released in its tens of millions into the UK countryside each year. Millions of Pheasant poults are imported into the UK and these represent a risk…
Two new confirmed cases of H5N8 bird flu in wild birds: a Buzzard in Somerset and a Canada Goose in Dorset. No new cases affecting domestic or commercial stock. In France, the country whose farmers have been hardest hit by bird flu, the mass cull of farmed ducks is beginning to come to an end…
Yesterday Defra revealed that there has been another outbreak of bird flu at a commercial turkey farm in East Lindsey, Lincolnshire. This was in the same district of Lincolnshire as the other main outbreak of H5N8 affecting a commercial premises which was also at a turkey farm and also in East Lindsey back in December….
There have been another four positive tests for H5N8 in wild birds in the last week: and Defra is still being cryptic about their localities. These new records only amount to four birds apparently but the Dorset case involves Mute Swans when presumably it should involve a Mute Swan – this shows the normal attention…
It didn’t take a lot ornithological nous to realise that nine Mute Swans with H5N8 bird flu virus in Dorset were quite likely to have come from Abbotsbury Swannery – as surmised in this blog on Saturday and trumpetted by the national press yesterday (Guardian, Telegraph, BBC). Defra doesn’t test additional birds from a location…
I speculated yesterday that avian flu cases involving White-fronted Goose and other species in Gloucestershire might well have been at the WWT nature reserve at Slimbridge and I’m grateful to WWT for confirming that this is the case. If I had lived locally to Slimbridge I might actually have seen them talking about the case…
Today the RSPB revealed that wild birds with H5N8 have been detected at two more RSPB nature reserves and yesterday the Chief Vet revealed that H5N8 had been found in a small backyard flock in Settle. These wild birds with H5N8 seem almost to be targetting RSPB nature reserves! Of course, the real explanation (I…