Everything is in flux, but if we really are leaving the EU then the biggest conservation opportunity is bound to be through changing our financing of agriculture. We spend £3bn per annum on agricultural support at the moment (in England and Wales). We can spend more or less than that post Brexit because we…
Tag: grouse shooting
Slim Chance of survival of Hen Harriers
Yet another satellite-tagged Hen Harrier, this one called Chance, has disappeared – her last known location (when transmitting a strong signal) was on a south Lanarkshire grouse moor. This sounds as though it must be in the same general area where Annie (pictured above) died. Add in Highlander whose satellite tag stopped transmitting…
Rewild our trashed hills
I think anyone looking at the landscape above would be hard-pressed to call it ‘natural’. It is drained and burned – and it has tracks running all the way through it. It’s the burning that creates that patchwork of different colours – patches of heather that were burned in different years according to a…
Guest blog – Bowland and its lack of raptors by Terry Pickford
I have been involved with monitoring and protecting raptors, in particular the Peregrine beginning 1967, when the North West Raptor Group was established, then only 7 active territories remained in the North West England. In the 1980s I located the first ground nesting pair of Peregrines close to the A6 on Shap. Field work began…
What you think – rewilding and grouse shooting
Readers of this blog, and its author, are keen on rewilding (below)… …and not very keen on grouse shooting…. These two things are not completely interdependent of course, but less land given over to intensive grouse shooting would allow more chance of rewilding of our uplands. I’ll be writing more about this next week. But…
You can’t have both – you have to choose.
Let’s just stick with Hen Harriers for a while – I’ll come back to wider environmental issues next week. And as far as Hen Harriers and driven grouse shooting go – you can’t have both, you have to choose. Ever since the results of the first Langholm study (see Chapter 3 of Inglorious and here)…
Request for film location
I keep being asked by film companies where they could go to film driven grouse shooting or obtain existing footage to use. Any grouse moors out there wishing to reveal the glories of the Inglorious 12th? Anyone know of locations where driven grouse shooting could be filmed from rights of way or the public highway?…
Hen Harriers in the Yorkshire Dales National Park (not)
Wouldn’t you love to be able to see a food pass by a pair of Hen Harriers in a National Park near you? The Yorkshire Dales National Park has much excellent habitat for Hen Harriers – it ought, with the adjacent Nidderdale AONB, to have at least a dozen nesting pairs. Since 2000, there should,…
What did Shania sing?
The RSPB really is in a pickle over its line on bird of prey persecution. Having welcomed the Hen Harrier inaction plan, welcomed the pathetic statement by the Moorland Association and disappointed many (except the Chief Exec of Songbird Survival) with its line on the Hen Harrier breeding season update, more and more people are…
43,000
That’s another thousand in the bag and we still aren’t half way in time yet. And it comes only two days after 42,000 was reached. That was a successful over! Thanks everyone! Take a look at the map which you will see is still dominated by rural constituencies, many of them in grouse moor areas:…