Dear Selfridges I am glad to hear from some of your customers that you are reviewing the sale of Red Grouse in your Food Hall – this is an excellent move on your part. Well done! You are probably aware of the report from the Ethical Consumer magazine which highlights the environmental problems with intensive…
Category: BAN DRIVEN GROUSE SHOOTING
Natural England – are you still there?
Natural England – for people, for places, for nature. NE, you have been studying Hen Harriers through satellite-tagging for 12 years and yet despite a hard-hitting report A Future for the Hen Harrier in England (2008) you have remained strangely silent about the worsening status of the Hen Harrier in England for six years. In…
Sky and Hope
The information that two young Hen Harriers (named Sky and Hope) have gone missing has been a talking point between Guildford and Sheffield – and beyond! I know that because I was giving a talk near Guildford on Wednesday evening and another in Sheffield on Thursday evening. At each, people were very concerned and surprised…
17,318+
Our e-petition to ban driven grouse shooting is the 21st most-signed of all those e-petitions, on all subjects, directed at any government department, that is still open for signature. It is also in the top 0.5% of the most-signed e-petitions (open or now closed) on the Westminster government website ever. So that’s pretty good –…
Boris aims to lead the shooting party…
…was a headline in the Evening Standard yesterday (Londoner’s Diary). The Tory supporters of Uxbridge are in for a real change when the birdwatching Sir John Randall is replaced by bird-blasting Boris Johnson next May (other candidates are available but may not get a look-in). Boris has been off grouse shooting it seems. A Twitter…
Two of our Hen Harriers are missing
Sky and Hope, female Hen Harriers fledged from United Utilities land in the Forest of Bowland in Lancashire, have gone missing. Scientists tracking the movements of the young Hen Harriers became concerned when their tags stopped transmitting. Sky’s satellite signal stopped suddenly on the evening of Wednesday 10 September with the data suggesting she was…
Keep going!
I’ve given the e-petition to ban driven grouse shooting a bit of a breather for the last few weeks but it keeps gaining signatures – 20,000 by Christmas? Might that be possible? The grouse shooting season ends on 10 December. Wouldn’t it be great if it never opened again? I had a nice chat to…
Just like a Hen Harrier
A female Montagu’s Harrier looks very similar to a female Hen Harrier. They can be rather difficult to tell apart unless you are familiar with the two species (or one of them very well). Both are brown, the same shape and with a white rump. Did you see the item on the One Show yesterday…
Government response to e-petition 65627
Our e-petition to ban driven grouse shooting passed the 10,000 signature mark on 31 July and received a response after nearly five weeks of brow-wrinkling thought on behalf of Defra on 1 September (maybe they thought I’d be touched by it appearing on the centenary of the extinction of the Passenger Pigeon). The sections in…
Let joy be unconfined!
Tomorrow I will address the pathetically evasive response from Defra to our e-petition to ban driven grouse shooting (that gives you a hint as to what I think about it) but you may have noticed that it mentions that there are four pairs of Hen Harrier in England this year. The existence of the fourth…