Mountain Hares are native to Britain and Ireland, unlike Brown Hares, so we should look after them. This very recent paper; … which is public access has an arresting title and the text looks pretty convincing to me. Grouse moors not great for Mountain Hares in the Peak District. Read the paper, look at the…
Tag: grouse shooting
Still earning after all the years
I occasionally tell you about the huge wealth that comes from writing books – well, my books anyway. I’ve just had a royalty payment from Bloomsbury for Birds and Forestry (1989, with Roderick Leslie), A Message from Martha (2014) and Inglorious (2015, 2nd edition 2016). In 2022 these three books, but basically Inglorious, earned me…
Alternatives to driven grouse shooting
This paper is a mixture of the completely obvious and the quite important. It takes the oft-quoted suggestion by pro-grouse-shooting interests, that the only real alternative land uses to intensive driven grouse shooting are harmful agriculture and harmful afforestation, and says that isn’t true. It clearly isn’t, because what happens in terms of land use…
Interesting
This article in the 4 December Guardian, by highly respected wildlife journalist Patrick Barkham, raised a few eyebrows at the time and prompted an anonymous but clearly well-informed guest blog here, Natural England and the Hen Harriers 30 December, which raised a number of points including questioning how Natural England’s Stephen Murphy could possibly know…
Guest blog – Natural England and Hen Harriers by ‘One who knows’
A lot is written about Hen Harriers and upland issues. It is nice to talk about the positives, but the article that Patrick Barkham wrote for the Guardian on the 4 December 2021 was a strange piece indeed. I would have been less surprised had the article been written by the cheerleaders for grouse shooting,…
Grouse shooting in the shared policy programme for the Scottish government
The draft shared policy document that forms the basis for a political alliance between the SNP and Scottish Green Party runs to a concise 51 pages. The document has six sections , two of which relate to the climate emergency and Scotland’s natural environment. It is good to see these alongside consideration of Scotland’s place…
Inglorious – no sparkle here
Driven grouse shooting still exists but it is beleaguered. It’s good to think of how far we have come in just a few years. It is a worthless hobby and its proponents have no answers to the charges against it except to ignore them. If driven grouse shooting hadn’t been invented c170 years ago then…
Sunday book review – Moorland Matters by Ian Coghill
I enjoyed reading this book very much. It immediately gets into my list of books of the year although I’d be surprised if it gets to the top of that shortlist, but you never know. I enjoyed it for three main reasons. First, it is a good read, clearly expressed and argued with some passion…
Tim Melling – Red Grouse
Tim writes: I took this photo in mid-October while out on the Peak District Moors. It was standing on a drystone wall and was just catching the first rays of the early morning sun. This photo shows the feathered legs and feet which gives rise to its scientific name Lagopus, meaning hare-footed. There are a…
This blog (2)
Things that happened during the last decade: 2011: First blog here First guest blog here by the still unknown-to-most-people, Mr White – the first of nearly 400 guest blogs published to date (this blog will still accept guest blogs) I travel across the USA and then come back I start writing a monthly column for…