Bowland gull cull 10 – update

Last week the RSPB published an interesting blog about the Forest of Bowland which included these passages: ‘The situation is complicated. Natural England have been attempting to tackle the historical culling consent granted to the Abbeystead Estate. As part of a 2016 Memorandum of Understanding, the estate voluntarily agreed not to cull gulls using these…

Ravens

The decision of SNH to issue a licence for a mass cull of  Ravens in Perthshire is absolutely stunning in its stupidity – see here. The next thing they’ll suggest is taking away Ravens from their nests, raising them in captivity and then letting them go again a few weeks later – see here. It…

Limp response from Natural England

I’ve been at Cheltenham racecourse this week, and it was just before the last race on Wednesday that our lawyer, Tessa Gregory, phoned me to say that we had had a response from Natural England to our pre-action protocol letter. It wasn’t a very interesting response as NE said that because they were dealing with…

Small steps

1. Early Day Motion 915 praising brood-meddling has not gathered any further support! In fact it is worse than that for its proposers, a Labour MP added his name and then removed it! So we see an EDM on the actions of NE and Defra whose only supporters are four DUP MPs and one SNP…

Bowland Gull Cull 8 – smidgeons of information from NE

In response to this:   Sent: 06 February 2018 07:39 To: FOI (NE) <foi@naturalengland.org.uk> Subject: RE: Bowland gull cull Nearly three months ago you told me that the NE investigation into the Bowland Gull Cull was moving to its final stages and that I would be informed of its outcome. I have not heard from…

More sense from Forest Enterprise England

Following on from yesterday lunchtime’s blog I have received the following information from Forest Enterprise England.  These are the letters sent by FEE’s Chief Executive to BASC and which were mentioned in the previous correspondence.  they date from 2015 but they are nonetheless interesting.   What do we learn from this? We learn that BASC…