Dear Selfridges I am glad to hear from some of your customers that you are reviewing the sale of Red Grouse in your Food Hall – this is an excellent move on your part. Well done! You are probably aware of the report from the Ethical Consumer magazine which highlights the environmental problems with intensive…
Tag: hen harrier
Natural England – are you still there?
Natural England – for people, for places, for nature. NE, you have been studying Hen Harriers through satellite-tagging for 12 years and yet despite a hard-hitting report A Future for the Hen Harrier in England (2008) you have remained strangely silent about the worsening status of the Hen Harrier in England for six years. In…
Sky and Hope
The information that two young Hen Harriers (named Sky and Hope) have gone missing has been a talking point between Guildford and Sheffield – and beyond! I know that because I was giving a talk near Guildford on Wednesday evening and another in Sheffield on Thursday evening. At each, people were very concerned and surprised…
Vote for Bob
The RSPB would like us to ‘Vote for Bob‘ who appears to be a Red Squirrel. Is Bob promising: an owl for everyone? a Red Squirrel for everyone? nuts for everyone? pointy ears for everyone? no grey days at all? I’m not really sure – Bob is like real politicians in being just a little…
Boris aims to lead the shooting party…
…was a headline in the Evening Standard yesterday (Londoner’s Diary). The Tory supporters of Uxbridge are in for a real change when the birdwatching Sir John Randall is replaced by bird-blasting Boris Johnson next May (other candidates are available but may not get a look-in). Boris has been off grouse shooting it seems. A Twitter…
Two of our Hen Harriers are missing
Sky and Hope, female Hen Harriers fledged from United Utilities land in the Forest of Bowland in Lancashire, have gone missing. Scientists tracking the movements of the young Hen Harriers became concerned when their tags stopped transmitting. Sky’s satellite signal stopped suddenly on the evening of Wednesday 10 September with the data suggesting she was…
People’s Climate March – London 21 September 2014
Emma Thompson leads off the People’s Climate March in London on Sunday afternoon. Vivienne Westwood and Peter Gabriel also attended. There are reports of 40,000 people joining the march but it felt like a smaller event than The Wave five years ago to me. There wasn’t a very obvious NGO presence – the occasional Panda…
Sunday book review – Birds and Climate Change by James Pearce-Higgins and Rhys Green
This is not an easy book to read, because it is quite technical, and unavoidably so, but it is an important one. The science is well-explained and if you want to understand how climate change is already affecting birds, and how it will in future, as well as how scientists study these matters, then it…
Keep going!
I’ve given the e-petition to ban driven grouse shooting a bit of a breather for the last few weeks but it keeps gaining signatures – 20,000 by Christmas? Might that be possible? The grouse shooting season ends on 10 December. Wouldn’t it be great if it never opened again? I had a nice chat to…
LUSH customers sign 20,000 Hen Harrier cards
LUSH stores spent a week featuring the plight of the Hen Harrier back in August. I was really impressed when I went into several stores to talk to the staff, starting with Martyn and Joe in Northampton and Amy, Grace, Helena, Hayley and Dave in Peterborough. My office still has the aroma of bath-bombs in…