Given that the Moorland Association has been strangely quiet recently it is worth noting that they are now trying hard to appear very very reasonable. It’s all a bit odd. Their responses to the RSPB statement on burning and Birdcrime report are rather moderately worded. I will be interested to see what the Moorland Association…
Tag: grouse moor
Grousers both
There really aren’t that many people involved in grouse shooting – it’s a niche hobby for the rich invented in the Victorian age and clinging on by its fingernails in the modern world. But once you get your eye in, you see them popping up everywhere in modern-day Britain. What failing government wouldn’t want to…
Driven grouse shooting – a mingle underpinned by wildlife crime
Coverage of the government ruling on whether Red Grouse shooting (open season 12 Aug- 10 Dec) and Pheasant shooting (open season 1 Oct – 1 Feb in England, Wales and Scotland) can go ahead has been phenomenal. I’ve had journalists phone me up today struggling to understand why their editor is wanting another piece on…
Christmas is cancelled – but the grouse must be shot
A day at the races? No. An afternoon at the football? No. Jogging with six friends? Of course not. A day on a grouse moor? Of course old boy. Rich people travelling from the towns to the uplands, drinking and shooting and then travelling home? An epidemiologist’s nightmare! The track and trace records for these…
Guest blog – Keep the Red Grouse Flying by James Walsh
James Walsh, also known as The Mancunian Birder, ecologist / author / journalist, is the author of “Northern Greenhouse – A New Vision of the North” and “Greater Manchester Birding City Region” Twitter: @MancunianBirder Website: mancunianbirder.wordpress.com YouTube: Mancunian Birder Here he keeps the Red Grouse flag flying high… whilst listening to Aztec Camera on Buzz…
Guest blog: A stranger’s Short Diary on encountering the grouse and pheasant shooting industry for the first time
The first year visiting village X, February 2018 I can only see a few feet ahead of me. A Swaledale trots up, but huffily bleats her complaint when she realises I’m not the farmer. A Red Grouse whirrs “go back, go back” and drops like an arrow at the end of its trajectory and is…
Labour calls for grouse shooting to be licensed
On the Inglorious 12th, the opening day of the Red Grouse shooting season, Luke Pollard, shadow DEFRA Secretary said: The government has failed to cut wildlife crime and a decade of austerity has left these birds [protected raptors] vulnerable to poaching, with fewer police preventing poaching and fewer officers able to catch those responsible. We…
It’s the silly season on the grouse moors
This piece in The National is a hoot. You can always spot dodgy pseudo-science when something is aiming to ‘prove’ something rather than to investigate it. And in this case gamekeepers are going to collect data on birds of prey on grouse moors. Quite what all this is about, who knows? We know birds of…
News from the grousers
Crispin Odey, grouse shooter and funder of You Forgot the Birds (logo any harrier except a Hen) seems like a lovely man. Craig Whitaker MP for Calder Valley whose constituency is often flooded by water pouring off grouse moors, and who spoke in favour of driven grouse shooting in the 2016 debate seems like a…
Press release – Ban Bloodsports on Yorkshire Moors
Doncaster Council has backed a ban on heather burning to save the region’s peat moors from being damaged for grouse shooting. In a letter sent to the Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs, Mayor Ros Jones said that the environmentally-damaging practice, which is performed by shoot operators to engineer breeding habitat for red grouse,…