David Harsent has won the prestigious TS Eliot prize for poetry for his collection of poems, Fire Songs. He is, the judges said, a poet ‘for dark and dangerous days’. This might seem a little off-subject for this blog, although I do try to maintain the appearance of having a thin veneer of culture. However,…
Category: BAN DRIVEN GROUSE SHOOTING
Hare today and gone tomorrow?
Just when the grouse shooters thought that things might get a bit quieter for them, another e-petition related to grouse shooting emerges that is bound to get a lot of support. This one is directed at the SNH Director of Policy and Advice, Ron Macdonald, and asks SNH to protect Mountain Hares from widespread unregulated…
Hen Harrier Day 2015 – thoughts?
It’s time to start thinking about what to do on Hen Harrier Day 2015 – which will be Sunday 9 August (the Sunday before the Inglorious 12th). Birders Against Wildlife Crime are organising a conference in Buxton in March and I’m sure that the subject will come up there. Here are some questions to…
2014 for Hen Harriers in pictures
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Langholm II
I’m not the only one who thinks that the GWCT hasn’t had a very good year according to the responses I’ve looked at in the readers’ survey for this blog (click here to enter your views). They are behaving so strangely that I wasn’t too surprised to read their rather odd account of the second…
Weak on crime, weak on the causes of crime
17 December: Andy Sawford (Shadow Minister (Communities and Local Government); Corby, Labour): To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, if she will publish a consultation on a licensing scheme for commercial game shooting. George Eustice (The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs; Camborne and Redruth, Conservative): Landowners…
A recap on e-petitions
Let’s just have a recap: Ban driven grouse shooting Number of signatures: 20,073 Open for signature until 30/3/15 Introduction of offence of vicarious liability for raptor persecution in England Number of signatures: 10,908 Closed 17/11/2012 Licencing of upland grouse moors and gamekeepers Number of signatures: 10,429 Closed 27/02/2014 You’d think, wouldn’t you, that…
Charles Moore shoots grouse
It’s funny, isn’t it, how many journalists who criticise the RSPB are shooters. And it’s funny how they somehow forget to mention the fact that they are shooters or involved in shooting when they write their criticisms of the RSPB’s opposition to people associated with shooting breaking wildlife law. We’ve had the case of Magnus…
You voted for them…
The responses coming in from your MPs don’t seem to be impressing you very much from what I see. There is, as several people have mentioned, a standard Conservative response to our fairly standardised series of questions running up to the Rally for Nature. It’s not surprising that the answer is a standard one, each…
Rallying
When you have as enjoyable time as I did on Tuesday at the Rally for Nature, it’s difficult not to keep thinking back to it. It’s also wrong not to keep thinking back to it. Here are just a few thoughts and a few photographs. Really good to see Charlie Moores, one of the…