The Rural Payments Agency has just (30 minutes ago) confirmed the amount of penalty imposed on the Stody Estate – it’s €263,308.10 (which according to my currency converter app is £192,160.63). This differs from the figure estimated by raptorpersecutionscotland by a fair margin – perhaps they will be blogging about this later in the day…
Category: REARED GAMEBIRDS
Stody fine
The raptorpersecutionscotland blog is on a roll at the moment and yesterday disclosed the fact that the Stody Estate has been fined, probably three quarters of its single farm payment, for the Buzzard killing on its land revealed by the conviction of its former gamekeeper Allen Lambert. This is excellent news and shows how the…
Too much crime, the Mutch case
Scottish gamekeeper, George Mutch, was yesterday sentenced to four months in prison for trapping a Goshawk and beating it to death. Mutch is the first gamekeeper to be jailed for killing raptors. Click here to see some of the video evidence that led to the conviction in December. It’s never a good thing for anyone…
Wildlife sites
Alan Parfitt made a good point in a comment here yesterday – SSSIs were originally meant to be good examples of fine habitats rather than a complete coverage of such habitats. Increasingly, they are the last remnants of those habitats and have remained largely because of their SSSI status. This is good news (the designation…
A nation of raptor-haters? Not all of us.
Yesterday a gamekeeper in Norfolk was found guilty of poisoning 10 Buzzards and a Sparrowhawk. It’s hardly news except that this is England’s worst single case of bird of prey poisoning. But ‘Well done!’ to Norfolk Police and to the RSPB. And District Judge Peter Veits said some interesting things too. If this had been…
And it’s not even worth a bean to the economy
The grouse shooting industry is having a torrid time of it – and I can assure them that there is more to come. Grouse shooting is a ‘sport’ or an ‘industry’. Over the years it has tried to justify itself on the grounds that it either doesn’t do any harm or it does do some…
Partridges up a tree
I’m pretty sure that most readers of this blog won’t be looking in pear trees for their partridges but even looking around the edges of arable fields you may struggle to see many of them. Despite all the excellent work that has been done to study the grey partridge (much of which is summarised in…
Pheasants in the balance
State of the UK’s Birds 2012 is full of interesting information. I was struck by the analysis of the number and weight of birds in the UK as a whole. In the early 1970s there were about 105 million pairs of birds in the UK – now there are around 83 million. More than a…
Shot partridges
Today sees the publication of Dick Potts’s book on partridges. I have reviewed the book for Birdwatch so you’ll have to wait to see that for my overall assessment. But I was interested to see that lead shot came up in the index a few times. I hadn’t realised that partridges sometimes suffer from accidental…
Pheasants
Remember there was a bit of fuss about pheasants and buzzards back in May? Around that time I was writing an article for BBC Wildlife magazine about pheasants! Now the article is out in the September (!) BBC Wildlife. Pheasants are amazing birds. They are tasty, beautiful and interesting. They are also amazingly abundant in…