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: hen harrier
Another reader’s letter
‘Hello Mark, I have just finished reading your absolutely fantastic book Inglorious, I bought the book on Chris Packham’s recommendation. It’s a long time since a book has made me quite so positively angry, I think Gabrielle Palmer’s The Politics of Breastfeeding has been the only other book to make me feel like this. I…
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…
A reader’s letter
This was a lovely email to get – and is just the impact that I hoped Inglorious would have with some of its readers. Hi Mark Just finished reading your book. Thought it brilliant – particularly chapter six, The sunlit uplands. I’m sending this just to re-emphasise (what you must already know!) that your campaign…
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….
12th night
I’ve always counted Twelfth Night as the 6 January but it might really be the 5th. But we should all be taking our Christmas decorations down now, and getting that tree out in the back garden to drop its needles there for a while as we wonder what to do with it (thank heaven for…
Another chance to vote for the Hen Harrier
This is a slightly odd one! Countryfile magazine has one of those readers’ votes running on subjects such as ‘Nature reserve of the year’, and ‘Pub of the year’ which includes ‘Conservation success of the year’. Now you wouldn’t necessarily expect a species whose English population should be over 300 pairs, but was actually 12…
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…
Almost forgot
We passed 26,000 signatures on our e-petition to ban driven grouse shooting a few days ago. It is now much closer to 27,000 than 26,000. If we banned driven grouse shooting we would: have lower water bills have less climate change have less flooding have more wildlife have better blanket bogs have more Hen Harriers…
2015 – the Hen Harrier year in pictures
The conflict between driven grouse shooting and Hen Harriers like Henry (or rather, not very like Henry) is a real one. Hen Harriers eat enough grouse seriously to reduce grouse bags when they are shot for fun. Grouse shooting interests illegally kill enough Hen Harriers in the UK to reduce their population to c6-800 pairs…