Mary Colwell is an award winning radio, TV and internet producer winning 14 awards over the last 5 years, including a Sony Gold in 2009. She is also a radio presenter and feature writer for The Tablet. She now produces Saving Species on Radio 4 which covers a wide range of environmental and wildlife issues….
Tag: Natural England
Guest Blog – RSPB science by David Gibbons
Dr David Gibbons is the RSPB’s Head of Conservation Science, a post he has been privileged to hold for the last 14 years. The previous incumbent in this post was a well-known environmental blogger, not a million miles from this site. Mark’s blog last week, comparing the quantity and quality of the scientific output…
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…
More good news – unless you are a raptor hater
Today the Environmental Audit Committee publishes a report on Wildlife Crime. Amongst other useful findings it recommends that the government in England and Wales introduces an offence of vicarious liability for wildlife crime (as already exists in Scotland) and makes the possession of the banned pesticide carbofuran illegal (as it already is in Scotland). In…
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…
Plastic environmentalism
The Conference speech by the new Defra Secretary of State, Owen Paterson, will have been like discordant music to the ears of the environment movement. It would be very difficult to find many working in the environment who think that the EU is perfect but it would be almost impossible to find people who think…
Lead poisoning still killing lots of birds and FSA advice on human health impacts ‘delayed’.
A just-published study reveals that lead gunshot is still a threat to wild waterbirds in the UK, over a decade after the use of lead gunshot was banned in wetlands and for shooting wildfowl in England ( similar but slightly different legislation pertains elsewhere in the UK). Waterfowl ingest spent lead shot whilst feeding. Sometimes…
Naturally curious
Reading the minutes of other people’s meetings is not my natural habitat or habit. However, you never know what you might find. The trouble is, most minutes are written to hide rather than expose any interesting parts of the meetings they purport to summarise. What might we find out if we had the energy to…