This email exchange shows that the cost of the abandoned legal proceedings by Natural England against the Walshaw Moor Estate were over £1m of taxpayers’ money. This is your money and you have been given no satisfactory explanation for why the case was dropped when a few months earlier NE had been pursuing the Walshaw…
Tag: Natural England
Wuthering Moors 21
This email between Natural England’s Andrew Wood and others (including some recipients whose names have been withheld) contains several matters of interest; Its title – this is the first time the the Secretary of State’s, Caroline Spelman’s, name has appeared to my knowledge in this case. It appears that back in December 2011 this case…
Guest blog – Are neonicotinoid pesticides responsible for the demise of bees and other wildlife? – by Rosemary Mason and Derek Thomas
Dr Rosemary Mason and Dr Derek Thomas are long-standing environmentalists One of us has just returned from Orkney, where for the first time, we found the rare great yellow bumble bee (Bombus distinguendus), now restricted to Northern Scotland and the offshore islands. She was leisurely foraging on red clover and garden knapweed on a track…
Wuthering Moors 20
We are beginning to shake some of the truth out of Defra over the Walshaw Moor affair. Below I attach four documents received either by myself or others through Freedom of Information Act and Environmental Information Regulation enquiries. They are: 1) a letter from the Secretary of the Moorland Association, Martin Gillibrand, to the Defra…
Cormorants are next
In what seems like undue haste, the hunting, shooting and fishing brigade have moved on to cormorants after failing (at least for a while) to get a receptive government department to licence some buzzard bothering. Cormorants are an easier target because they aren’t very pretty. Don’t get me wrong, they are quite pretty (in an…
Wuthering Moors 19 – what is Defra hiding?
If you track back to 2 April on this blog you will find that I made Freedom of Information Act and Environmental Information Regulation requests to Defra and Natural England. Defra failed to respond to those requests until sending me a letter dated 4 May saying that they needed another 20 working days to respond. …
Wuthering Moors 18 – your help needed please
For new readers – put ‘Wuthering’ into the search facility on this blog to catch up. However, in short: Natural England were quite a long way down the line in prosecuting an upland landowner for alleged offences in connection with moorland management when it suddenly stopped all action and reached an agreement with the estate….
Five short jobs, since it’s quite likely to be raining
1. Support Plantlife’s campaign to make verge-cutting ecologically literate. Have a look at these photographs from Nigel and Lois Harbron of a small patch of what is essentially a flower meadow which poses no threat to road safety and is bureaucratically scalped every year. 2. Spend two minutes to get a bank to give $5…
Bonfires and beacons
Despite the soggy weather, beacons have been lit across the UK to celebrate the Diamond Jubilee. Spare a thought for the inhabitants of Tristan da Cunha and their Jubilee beacon. When the most remote Jubilee beacon in the world was lit, its flames were fuelled by the bodies of invasive species of plants. Work to…
Gone twitching – not really
At the weekend I went on a twitch, looking for a rare bird – except it is just a rarer bird rather than a really rare one. I realised that I didn’t see a spotted flycatcher last year, partly because I was looking at mountain bluebirds instead, and I hadn’t seen one yet this year…