I thought hard about whether or not to launch a third e-petition on the subject of banning driven grouse shooting – and then I did. The current e-petition closes at midnight in two weeks time – and started five and a half months ago. I have no idea how many times I have refreshed the…
Tag: hen harrier
Sunday book review – Badgered to Death by Dominic Dyer
I enjoyed reading this book and I strongly recommend it to you. This is a powerful and stimulating read and it’s bang up to date with the important issue it discusses. It is written by a passionate insider with years of experience. The narrative is pacey and exciting. This book arrived with me on Thursday…
August – a top month
Signatures on our e-petition Can you remember how many signatures our e-petition to ban driven grouse shooting had, as we entered August? 68,000. And we left August with 118,000. That’s 50,000 signatures in a month. Did I mention that we had momentum? Wasn’t that phenomenal? Hen Harrier Days, the Inglorious 12th, and the Bird Fair…
Caption competition
Amanda Anderson seen talking to the boys in blue at Edale Hen Harrier Day. A couple of Amanda’s most famous quotes; ‘If we let the hen harrier in, we will soon have nothing else.‘ ‘From the clip, it is very difficult to make out any detail at all, either of a person or a decoy….
Review of English sat tag data narrowed to zero species
They do things differently in Scotland – quite often better (but you’d never know from the rubbish that the SNP MPs are sending their constituents). Scotland has vicarious liability – denied to the English by a grouse-moor-owning Defra minister. Scotland is carrying out a review of losses of satellite-tagged raptors to investigate how many of…
More wearisome science
Remember according to the not-so-talented Viscount Ridley ‘Hen harriers, which are ground-nesting birds vulnerable to foxes, are thriving in Scotland … in places where gamekeepers control fox numbers.‘ and grouse-shooter Charles Moore, ‘…most such accusations about the killing of hen harriers are false’ and ‘hen harriers do better on kept moors than on unkept ones…‘. Well,…
Spectator has blurred vision (1)
You may remember (or you may not, which is why I am reminding you) that I contrasted the view of Hen Harrier biology of Charles Moore, Spectator columnist and grouse shooter, with that of published science by the RSPB (Compare and contrast, 23 August)(see the data above and Mr Moore’s comment at foot of…
The SNP standard response – Firm Briefing 9
Before tackling the tricky issue of SNP MPs in the Westminster parliament, let me just say that support for our e-petition has been very strong in Scotland: it has received c12,000 signatures from Scotland out of a UK total so far of 118,000 – that’s c10% of all signature compared with Scotland representing c8.4% of…
Sunday book review – Britain’s Birds by Rob Hume et al.
This book is very good. Why would you need another bird identification guide or field guide? Because this one is very good! This is a quite straight forward bird identification guide – there isn’t much mucking about with other information – and that’s good. It covers birds you might see in Britain and Ireland –…
118,000 signatures, three weeks to go and Firm Briefing 7
Our e-petition is still moving briskly along – this will partly be thanks to the impact of last week’s Bird Fair. Some will have heard about the e-petition for the first time at the Bird Fair (that may be difficult for some of you to believe but it’s certainly true) and also 11,000 leaflets were…