Not a great deal of MP action this week. I had a letter from my own MP (dated 23 October) in response to my email to him (8 October) saying that ‘In order to ensure that Ministers are aware of your concerns and to provide you with an official and fully informed response’ … ‘I…
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Dutch People’s Walk for Wildlife
Last Sunday some friends in The Netherlands had their own Walk for Wildlife – and they had better weather than we did! Here is the message that Chris Packham sent them in advance. And a link to an account of the walk – in English (and for our Dutch readers here, here) It looks good…
See you in Kent on Saturday?
Here is a link to the booking form but I’m not sure whether there are any places left… It looks like a good event and I might even see some birds on the trip.
Midhope Moors – burned blanket bog
Burned Sphagnum photographed yesterday on Midhope Moors, Peak District. And here is Midhope Moors with the blanket bog shaded in buff from the Defra MAGIC system https://magic.defra.gov.uk/MagicMap.aspx And some more burned Sphagnum up there in the blanket bog. Well, this looks to me like a recent burn. I understand that Wakefield Farms are the landowners…
Social impact
Do you recall that over a year ago a PhD position was advertised at the University of Northampton, just down the road from me, on the social impact of driven game shooting. At the time I wrote this. Yesterday I went to a seminar on the first year of the study and heard how the…
Policing the burning agreement
This was the example of moorland burning I saw on the northern edge of the Yorkshire Dales National Park three weeks ago. Does this comply with the voluntary agreement made by many grouse moors not to burn on blanket bogs? There are a couple of things that I would need to know before I could…
News of a reader
Sometimes I wonder what has happened to erstwhile frequent commenters on this blog who seem to have gone missing. Giles Bradshaw has commented many times on this blog – usually under his own name but I’ve caught him trying to have conversations with himself under aliases too. Giles’s comments go back to August 2011 and…
An NE staff member writes…
The following is a lightly edited version of an email I recently received from someone whose identity I know, and who I know to be a NE employee. Understandably their identity is not revealed here. The editing I have done is mostly to remove clues as to their identity. I work for NE. I’m writing…
How to please an author
Occasionally, and obviously out of the blue, I get an email a bit like this. Just finished Inglorious. Thank you so much for writing this book. I am ‘relatively’ knowledgeable I feel about land use issues, but I learnt so much from you. I was rudely awakened as to the realities of the driven grouse…
What your MP says about the Manifesto for Wildlife
About a month ago a group of independent experts , under the leadership of Chris Packham, published a People’s Manifesto for Wildlife. Many of us have written to our MPs asking thenm for their views (not for a party politrical broadcast in favour of the current government) and those responses are slowly coming home to…