I’ve read this document – click here – several times, and I’ll need to read it several times more to get the most out of it. But my initial rating of it is 6.5/10 which is quite a bit higher than I expected. I’d be very interested in others’ views on this document and I’d…
Tag: Bowland
Why Hen Harriers don’t prosper in the Forest of Bowland and what could be done about it
Introduction: This blog was prompted by reading the Draft Management Plan for the Forest of Bowland National Landscape (the new name for the Forest of Bowland Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty). I have written several earlier versions of this blog and electronically ripped them up and put them in the bin. This is where I…
Eye witness account of a Hen Harrier killing in Bowland
The RSPB has this evening published an eyewitness account of the killing of an adult Hen Harrier in Bowland last October. Read it and weep! I’ve known about this case for quite a while and I know the eyewitness as one of the many raptor enthusiasts in the Bowland area. By chance, the area where…
Good news – 4 Hen Harrier nests in Bowland
The RSPB has just released the news that there are four Hen Harrier nests in the Forest of Bowland on the United Utilities estate. this area is managed for water resources with low intensity farming and low intensity grouse shooting. The Forest of Bowland is a large area with several intensive grouse moors within its…
Bowland harriers
Stephen Murphy of Natural England is backing up the Moorland Association’s nonsense that having brood meddling is turning gamekeepers into good guys according to a report in the Lancashire Post. I’m looking forward to writing in some detail about brood meddling again when we receive judgement from Ms Justice Lang but as we said when…
Bowland Gull Cull 24
Dr Coffey – what a charmer! What an advocate for wildlife she is as biodiversity minister!
Bowland’s burning
This image, from a walker, shows moorland burning a few days ago on Forest of Bowland grouse moors. This burn was on the slopes of Conder Head. Now, the Duke of Westminster’s Abbeystead Estate has signed up to the voluntary agreement not to burn blanket bog – so was this a transgression? According to this…
Putting two and two and one together in one small corner of the Bowland Fells
The locations of five Hen Harriers whose satellite tags have mysteriously ceased to transmit in and adjacent to an SPA set up to protect Hen Harriers: SD596621 tag id 94591 tagged by NE 23 June 2010, ceased transmitting 18 Aug 2010 SD617605 ‘Hope’ tagged by RSPB summer 2014, ceased transmitting 13 September 2014 SD624632 Thor…
Hen Harrier Sensitive Zones in Bowland
The Bowland Fells SPA sits between Lancaster and Clitheroe, and High Bentham and Longridge, east of the M6 in Lancashire. It was classified in 1993 and one of the qualifying criteria was the number of nesting pairs of Hen Harriers (13) at that time. For a long time Bowland was the English stronghold of this…
Bowland Gull Cull 23
Received from Natural England this afternoon. So this confirms that someone called ‘Trustee of 4th Duke of Westminster 1964 Settlement’, which I take to mean the Abbeystead Estate in this instance, committed offences in late June and early July 2017 in the Bowland Fells SSSI, to wit the bumping off of juvenile Lesser Black-backed Gulls…