18,000!

The Calder Valley is the first English constituency to reach 100 signatures on our e-petition to ban driven grouse shooting (highlighted in blue above). It joins Inverness, Nairn, Badenoch and Strathspey (113 signatures) and Ross, Skye and Lochaber (110 signatures) in the ‘100 club’. Yesterday the total number of signatures passed 18,000 signatures and we…

What nature does for Britain – quotes

I reviewed Tony Juniper’s book on ecosystem services quite a while back, but after a tweet from him yesterday supporting the questions I posed to Countryfile, I went back and checked what Tony had written about grouse moors. Page 102: ‘We’ll always be able to treat the water, it’s just that it’s very expensive’ [A…

Please could Northumberland National Park…

Please could Northumberland National Park name, or at least give a reference, for the 20% of Britain’s spiders that will disappear if upland heather burning were to cease. I’m pretty sure that the one above isn’t one of them. But I was wondering, surely the lowlands are the place for spiders anyway – like they…

Countryfile 2

Yesterday’s blog on the item on heather burning on Sunday’s Countryfile clearly chimed with a lot of people.  It was read by over 5000 folk yesterday evening and attracted a lot of comments both here and on social media. Controlled burning to stop wildfires has been likened to throwing away all your money to prevent…

Dear Countryfile

  Dear Countryfile I’m pretty sure I am the type of person you think you are appealing to – interested in nature and the countryside – but I rarely watch you because you have such a blatant agenda of trying to paint a small subset of those of us who live in the countryside as…