From the parliament website: Anna Turley MP: To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, pursuant to Answer of 15 June 2018 to Question 152799 and Answer of 02 July 2018 to Question 157791 on Special Protection Areas: Birds, on what date her Department received the results of the public…
Category: THE STATUTORY AGENCIES: NE, EA, FE etc
Bowland Gull Cull 19 – comments on NE’s response
This is the fifth blog post on this subject today; the other four have dealt with NE’s very tardy response to my FoI/EIR requests. 1. I started this enquiry by asking NE whether they had consented the culling of Lesser Black-backed Gulls in the Bowland Fells for 2017. NE’s reply was that there was no…
Bowland Gull Cull 18 – the Habitats Regulations Assessment
Having read NE’s response to my FoI/EIR request, and the proposed MoU between NE, Abbeystead, Bleasdale and United Utilities and the SSSI/SPA Management Plan, we now move on to the 27 pages of the Habitats Regulations Assessment. This document is where NE assesses whether a plan or project will affect a site designated under the…
Bowland Gull Cull 17 – the SSSI/SPA Management Plan
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I’m now moving on to the next document that NE sent me – the Bowland Fells SSSI/SPA Management Plan. This is quite a big document – 22 pages. This is how it starts: So, we learn here that there are LBBG Sensitive Areas – and I think we can call the rest of the area…
Bowland Gull Cull 16 – the MoU
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Reading NE’s reponse to me (a response after over a year) it looked like there might not have been any consent to kill Lesser Black-backed Gull in the Bowland Fells SPA that was partly notified to protect them. But the next place to look seemed to be the MoU that NE sent me and which…
Bowland Gull Cull 15 – NE’s much-delayed response to FoI/EIR request
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After more than a year, Natural England are beginning to come clean about their role in the Bowland Gull Cull (see here for series of earlier blogs). This is the letter I received from NE last Monday afternoon. At face value, this might give the impression that there was no consent for a gull cull. …
A good year for Hen Harriers in England – let’s hear it for the voles!
Hen Harriers in England have had a good breeding season this year – there were 14 nesting attempts, of which 9 produced a total of 34 fledged young. These 9 nests were, I think: 3 nests on United Utilities land (where grouse shooting occurs) in the Forest of Bowland, Lancashire, which were guarded by RSPB…
That damning report on the Raven cull
Earlier today SNH issued a statement and published their own Scientific Advisory Committee’s views on the value of SNH’s highly controversial licensing of a Raven cull in the Strathbraan area. Reading the SNH statement you might get the impression that the SAC did have some serious doubts about the project that SNH had licensed but…
NEWS: SNH admit Raven cull error – but fail to apologise for it
This was issued this morning by SNH – it represents a significant victory for the challenge by the Scottish Raptor Study Group, led by Ruth Tingay, to the legality of the licence to cull Ravens issued by SNH. See also the report by the Scientific Advisory Committee. I’ll come back to this later today….
Bowland Gull cull 13 – NE promises a response
In response to my recent questions about the Bowland gull cull of 2017 I have now received this: