There’s probably nothing in this thought, but it keeps coming back to me. Is driving a moorland legal? We know that shooting a Red Grouse is legal, within the open season, but is it legal to get a line of people to walk across a moorland waving flags and blowing whistles and disturbing every living…
Tag: grouse shooting
Saturday cartoon by Ralph Underhill
Mountain Hares are culled in uncontrolled and sometimes very large numbers on grouse moors, primarily in Scotland, because the hares carry a tick, which carries a virus, which can harm Red Grouse, that people will pay large sums to shoot. One Kind, a Scottish-based wildlife NGO is one of the organisations campaigning to end this…
Socio-economics of grouse shooting
A masters student at Harper Adams is investigating the socio-economics of grouse shooting with an online survey that appears to be open to anyone but seems to be mostly circulated among gamekeepers on Facebook! Call me cynical if you like, but I just wonder whether this might emerge at some future date as ‘a detailed…
EPIC FAIL 3 – MPs and their constituents
Given that this is the last day of life, if you call that living, of the e-petition in support of grouse shooting (currently standing at 25,320 signatures), it is interesting to look back to the debate in parliament and the MPs who spoke or intervened in that debate. Here are two lists of MPs, a…
Guest blog – Peak District paths by Bob Berzins
Bob writes: I have a life long passion for the outdoors through rock climbing and fell running. A cancer scare in my thirties made me appreciate many things I simply hadn’t noticed before, from the smallest plants to the gap in the sky from a missing raptor. It’s all worth fighting for and that’s what…
Misguided meddlers
Therese Coffey was handed a hospital pass when Rory Stewart zipped off to another department leaving her holding the Hen Harrier Recovery Farce. A key, and totally ridiculous, element of the plan was to take away young Hen Harriers from grouse moors, raise them expensively in captivity, and then release them again on grouse moors…
Back to the plaque
Do you remember the plaque? The blue plaque? The blue plaque that attached itself to a shooting lodge in Rosedale in the North York Moors National Park and then mysteriously vanished when this blog mentioned it? You do? (for new readers, see Here’s a puzzle for you, 27 September; Did someone nick a plaque? 27…
Reply from Defra
I wrote to my MP asking him to pass on my approval of what George Eustice, the agriculture minister, said about funding for grouse moors in his remarks at the Oxford Farming Conference. Here is the reply. It doesn’t say that much, but MPs, ministers, in fact all of us, like being told that we…
RSPB – go ask for the NE data.
One of the quotes from today’s RSPB Birdcrime report is; ‘Natural England holds a wealth of data from hen harriers tagged since 2007. We have recommended that the Government commissions an independent investigation of these data to help determine where and why tagged hen harriers and other tagged birds of prey are disappearing.’ Well, there…
Birdcrime and news of another shot Hen Harrier
The RSPB report on crimes against birds in 2015 has just been published online. 2015 seems like a long time ago but the report is a strong reminder of the scale of wildlife crime against birds that still exists in this country in the twenty-first century. Remember Annie? Stody Estate withdrawal of subsidy? Mutch case?…