I’ll be at the Norfolk Wildlife Trust Cley Visitor Centre tomorrow morning signing copies of my book, Fighting for Birds, for anyone who wants a copy (or copies – remember Christmas isn’t that far away). I have many happy memories of Cley, but before we get on to them, and how you can help to…
Tag: hen harrier
Raptor round up
It would be perfectly possible to write about birds of prey, how wonderful they are and their troubled and shortened lives, every day on this blog. I try not to do that because there are other sites that do it so well (raptor politics and raptor persecution Scotland) and because there are other big issues…
Five years on…
On the evening of 24 October 2007 I was on the train to London and received a phone call from one of my staff. He told me that he had received a report from a Natural England staff member who had just seen two hen harriers shot out of the air on or near the…
Wuthering Moors – 29 The bigger picture
The Walshaw Moor Estate case is important in itself, and we commend again the RSPB for taking a firm stand on it, but it is also indicative of a much wider and deeper Defra malaise. If Defra is not now acting merely as the Rural Jobs and Fieldsports Department then it needs to get its…
Wuthering Moors 28
In a move that will be highly embarrassing for the UK government, particularly for Defra and the Defra Minister Richard Benyon, the RSPB today launched a complaint to the European Commission over the Walshaw Moor affair. The RSPB is ‘Stepping up for Nature’ by suggesting that Natural England, the delivery agency of Defra, contravened European…
Wuthering Moors 27 – Secrecy and power
The revelations over the 23-year old events at Hillsborough have been shocking – deeply shocking. But I wonder how many of us felt a little personal guilt for moments when we thought ‘It’s a long time ago’ or ‘Let it go’? This week the obstinacy and determination, and passion (there was lots of passion), from…
Mmmmm! Yummy!
I tell the story in Fighting for Birds of staying at the house of a grouse moor manager and being given grouse to eat for dinner. I quite like grouse but I prefer pheasant on my plate. There was a bit of an expectant hush as my host and some other guests waited to see…
Saturday 6
You do know what day it is don’t you? In my ‘political birder’ column in this month’s Birdwatch magazine I discuss whether nature conservationists should be causing a few more problems for the fieldsports community in response to the lack of hen harriers, buzzardgate and the call to put goosander and cormorant on the general…
Guest Blog – response to Mark Avery by Magnus Linklater
Magnus Linklater is a former editor of The Scotsman and Scottish Editor of The Times. He is trustee of an estate in Perthshire, and a regular commentator on rural affairs. I knew that taking on the RSPB would be nothing but trouble. But I was not quite prepared for the volume and ferocity of…
Shuffle
The Bird Fair was great – and will have provided much inspiration for future blogs. I’ll come back to it soon but let’s change tack to politics. David Cameron, and everyone else, deserves a holiday, but the PM’s mind may be spinning over a rumoured reshuffle. Let me first say that I think that it…