It’s that time of year when authors are told whether they have earned any money from the Public Lending Right system. If any libraries have your books on their shelves, and if anyone borrows them (as judged by a sample of libraries) then you get some dosh, at the rate now of 9p/loan. My books…
Tag: grouse shooting
Werritty evidence session tomorrow
Tomorrow morning, from 09:30, the Scottish Environment, Climate Change and Land Reform Committee will take evidence from three members of the Werritty group whose report on licensing of grouse moor management was so inadequate. The three members are the Chair, Prof Alan Werritty, and Prof Colin Reid and Prof Alison Hestor. It will be interesting…
Uptown girl…
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Two Cambridge colleges, at either end of The Backs, have recently announced their new ‘Masters’. At the up-town end of the waterway, and said to be the richest per student capita college of all, St John’s, the new Master will be Heather Hancock. Mrs Hancock has featured in this blog now and again over the…
Number 10 is looking for weirdos
It is possible, but very unlikely, that Dominic Cummings was reading my latest column in British Wildlife which points out that we need some more experts in Westminster and Whitehall when he wrote his latest blog post. Cummings called for misfits and weirdos to bolster government’s ability to know what it is doing. He has…
Hen Harrier Day 2020
Hen Harrier Days celebrate a fantastic bird and highlight the illegal persecution that it faces. They are a family occasion, a show of solidarity with nature and a call to action. The Hen Harrier is a rare native bird and it would be much commoner if we could end wildlife crime. Yet public awareness remains…
December 2019 – a record month in a strong year.
And so 2019 draws to an end. How was it for you? Here on this blog, December 2019 was a record December. Previous Decembers had never got into the 80,000s in pageviews, with December 2015 (at 79,000 pageviews) being the best December on record until this year when, as of yesterday, the pageviews already surpassed…
Wildlife crime on grouse moors so well-established that it features on TV quiz shows
On University Challenge (Christmas series) the other night there was a question about which species is ‘… said by the RSPB to be the UK’s most intensively persecuted bird, partly because of illegal killing by gamekeepers on grouse moors’. Neither team got Hen Harrier (even though the scientific name had been given and some other…
Guest blog – War on Wildlife Project by Charlie Moores
A life-long birder, Charlie Moores co-founded Birders Against Wildlife Crime and is a former trustee of League Against Cruel Sports. He writes and makes podcasts about wildlife and the environment. Twitter: @charliemoores So I’m in the kitchen at home, mid-2015. Thinking about things. I’d like to say about Hen Harrier Day or bettering my efforts…
Looking back at 2019 – Jan – March
I was out on 1 January last year doing a winter farmland bird survey where I was rewarded by first hearing and then seeing a Wood Lark in east Northants. That was a good way to start the year. A post on 2 January predicted that it was going to be a bad year for…
From the Guardian…
Sir Stephen Houghton, the Labour leader of Barnsley council, said … there needed to be a review of whether agricultural practices upstream, such as the burning of heather moorland and removal of peat, were causing rainwater to rush downstream and rivers to burst their banks in residential areas. PM urged to overhaul flood defence funding…