Standing up for Nature
The Guardian reports that Twitter will trial a means of allowing users to flag and annotate misleading or inaccurate tweets – this will be called Birdwatch in an attempt to piggy-back on the respected profile of the UK’s premier birdwatching magazine. A spokesperson for Birdwatch magazine may have said ‘We’re touched that the small inconsequential…
Peatlands cover <3% of the world’s land surface but account for >33% of soil carbon – that’s a fact with which to amaze your dinner guests (when you are allowed to have them again). This paper reviews studies of the impacts of road and track building through peatlands – this sort of thing: see here,…
Things are moving slowly in shooting, but in the right direction it seems. Fifty million biodegradable shotgun cartridges this year – that’s enough to replace just those used in Pheasant shooting in the UK in a normal year where about 15 million Pheasants are shot but that takes between three and four cartridges per downed…
Assessing the success or failure of brood meddling for Hen Harriers cannot adequately be measured by looking at survival of chicks in captivity even if this were to be compared with correctly comparable nests in the wild. How about post-release survival too? There are plenty of potential reasons why captive-reared chicks might fail to survive…
The investigation of brood meddling of Hen Harriers which Natural England has licensed has resulted in 14 chicks being taken into captivity and 13 of them being released into the wild again. That sounds quite good, but how would we assess how good it is? Obviously, we can’t simply compare the number of captive-reared chicks…