John Armitage’s well-supported e-petition has received the following response from Defra: ‘As this e-petition has received more than 10 000 signatures, the relevant Government department have provided the following response: The Government is aware of incidences of illegal killing of birds of prey and Ministers take the issue very seriously. To address this, senior Government…
Category: Grouse and harriers
Wuthering Moors 43
This is the fourth blog today on the subject of burning of blanket bog (see here, here, and here). These were sparked (!) by the RSPB releasing data on the scale of the issue and calling for an end to the burning of blanket bog. There has been a little media coverage of this –…
Wuthering Moors 42
The scale of burning of English blanket bogs revealed by the latest RSPB work is scary. There are 127 separate consents (mostly through HLS agreements – ie we taxpayers are paying for it too) for burning on blanket bogs. These affect these seven Special Areas of Conservation (SACs)(Border Mires, Kielder-Butterburn; Ingleborough Complex; Moor House –…
Wuthering Moors 41
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Following my blog ‘first’ thing this morning here is some more information on the damage that burning does to blanket bogs. Martin Harper’s blog today expands on the RSPB’s thinking about burning of blanket bog. More details of the RSPB’s complaint to the EU over the management (they clearly regard it as mis-management, as did…
Burn, maybe burn (aka Wuthering Moors 40)
The RSPB is getting stroppy about burning of blanket bogs – I like that. Burning heather on a rotation of 7-20 years is part of the industrialisation of the upland landscape of parts of the UK. The main reason for doing it is to produce totally unnaturally high densities of Red Grouse which can then…