Who I am – Scottish with a fascination for wildlife from childhood – in lieu of formal qualifications (and not being able to flash them about!) – was on the 1990 International Youth Conservation Exchange to Hungary, was the 1993 winner of the BBC Wildlife Magazine ‘Realms of the Russian Bear’ competition and spent nearly…
Category: BAN DRIVEN GROUSE SHOOTING
5 and 6 December – are you coming? #justice4henharriers
Our legal challenge (and RSPB’s) of Natural England’s crazy decision to license brood meddling of Hen Harriers will be heard in the High Court, in the Royal Courts of Justice on 5 and 6 December. You can attend and watch and listen to the arguments. The public can attend. You can attend. I’d like you…
Three more gone – Defra’s plan is wholly inadequate.
Hen Harrier, Hilma. Photo: Steve Downing. Hen Harrier, Octavia. Photo: Steve Downing Hen Harrier, Heulwen. Photo: Guy Anderson. Three more young Hen Harriers have disappeared – all in areas of driven grouse shooting. See the RSPB Skydancer blog for details. Rory Stewart’s Hen Harrier Inaction Plan is working very, very badly – just as many…
An alternative narrative
Natural England’s answers to some questions about the failure of two Hen Harrier nests on a Yorkshire grouse moor this season were published on this blog this morning. To be fair to NE, they only responded to the questions I posed, rather than giving a full account of events on this grouse moor over the…
NE and grouse moor Hen Harriers
I asked NE some questions about their role in protecting two nests of Hen Harriers in Yorkshire last summer (2018). The two nests were on the same estate and one male was paired with two females. Natural England’s account of what happened on this moor does not fully accord with what local raptor workers tell…
A Labour MP writes
I was interested to see this response that a blog reader received from their Labour MP. I long for the day when I have a Labour MP, but as I don’t, I cannot write to check how close this is to the standard letter sent out to constituents by other Labour MPs. But maybe you…
Press release from Leigh Day – brood-meddling judicial review
A legal case to challenge the trial of brood management of endangered hen harriers will be heard in the High Court on 5 and 6 December 2018. Permission was given in July for a judicial review of Natural England’s decision to grant a licence to allow brood management of the birds. The case is being…
Natural England in a new mess with Hen Harrier data
Natural England published a skeletal version of its Hen Harrier tracking dataset back in September 2017, after years of pressure from this blog and others. Last Saturday it updated that dataset by adding one extra column – of grid references of the last good fixes of Hen Harriers that were known to be dead or…
Hen Harrier survey, 2016, published
The headline results of this survey were released in June 2017 but now the full paper has emerged in Bird Study. Status of the Hen Harrier Circus cyaneus in the UK and Isle of Man in 2016. Simon R. Wotton, Stephen Bladwell, Wendy Mattingley, Neil G. Morris, David Raw, Marc Ruddock, Andrew Stephenson and Mark…
Our Hen Harrier data
We are going to have to wait a little while or a long while to see the results and findings of the long-awaited analysis of the Hen Harrier satellite-tagging study that you and I (as taxpayers) have funded for many years. However, it already looks as though the findings could be the dynamite to blow…