isn’t Bruce Springsteen fantastic?! Maybe not relevant to most topics on this blog but I have spent a large part of the day with The Boss on in the background on Spotify. I even joined in sometimes. yesterday Barry Gardiner MP (Lab Brent North) called for a parliamentary debate on whether to ban driven grouse…
Tag: grouse shooting
The missing signatures – mind the gap!
I recently received this email from an RSPB member and keen member of a local RSPB group. ‘I have just finished reading your book ‘Inglorious’, which I found very informative. I had no idea that driven grouse shooting had such a deleterious effect on wild life, especially on birds of prey, and I now would…
Debate on floods (updated with links and quotes)
I watched the opposition day debate on the floods with interest – every minute of it. There were quite a lot of MPs, of both main political parties, taking the time to praise their constituents and to ask for promises of government money. Fair enough. Some of them were more subtle and convincing than others….
Wuthering Moors 52
This is a map of Walshaw Moor which was used in the 2012 case against the estate which was mysteriously dropped by Natural England. You can make out the purple areas, which are made up of lots of purple lines, which the key tells us are artificial watercourses. Many of these would be known to…
Implausible deniability
This time last year I was finishing writing Inglorious. As I wrote it, it became clearer to me that the game really was already up for driven grouse shooting – it was on its last legs but it might keep stumbling along for a decade or more because of the power of the vested interests…
Floods and land use
Although dominated by talk of whether the flood defences were expensive enough, high enough, built quickly enough or in the right places, there has been more discussion than usual about the role of land use and flooding in the media and on this blog. In case you missed them, here is a list of…
I will lift up my eyes unto the hills…
‘I will lift up my eyes unto the hills from whence cometh my floods’ As the Moorland Association brags, 70% of the UK’s drinking water comes from the uplands – so do 70% of the UK’s floods, for water has the habit of flowing downhill. The River Ouse flowing through York, or over York, is…
2015 – a bad year for driven grouse shooting
Few Red Grouse were shot in the UK this year, mainly because of disease and bad weather. But regardless of grouse bags, this was a very bad year for driven grouse shooting and hastened the end of this worthless hobby. The case against driven grouse shooting is that it depends on intensive management that involves…
2015 in the Birdwatch readers’ Blog of the year 2015 – July-Dec
Comments Off on 2015 in the Birdwatch readers’ Blog of the year 2015 – July-Dec
This is the review of the second half of 2015 through the writings of this blog (for Jan-June) – click here for first half of year. July: The Committee on Climate Change criticise the intensive management of grouse moors because of carbon emissions (see here and here). NGOs across the EU rally together to defend…
2015 in the Birdwatch readers’ Blog of the Year – Jan-June
January: I saw a Great Grey Shrike locally (I’d forgotten until I looked back), Defra were hopeless (hardly news, I know), David Harsent won the TS Eliot prize for poetry for a book which included a poem about a killed Hen Harrier, a Scottish gamekeeper was jailed for killing raptors, SNH was put under pressure…