It’s a long time now since I worked in nature conservation and so increasingly I find that the jargon has moved on from that with which I used to be entirely comfortable. When Moorland Management Plans came up in a conversation with an old friend I had to admit to being unaware of what they…
Tag: Natural England
Wildlife barbecue
Here’s an example of wildlife benefitting from moorland burning (which is done to produce unnaturally high densities of Red Grouse for shooting for fun). Can anyone identify this scorched caterpillar please? The best guesses so far are Northern Eggar (but perhaps Fox Moth). Help me out please if you are an expert on barbecued…
Burning issues
From the heather and grass burning code: Areas within 5 metres of watercourses. There can be an increased risk of soil erosion close to watercourses (e.g. once vegetation has been removed by burning, soil could be washed into a watercourse by rainwater, or the watercourse might flow with sufficient force that its banks could…
Guest blog – England’s Serengeti? by Steve Jones
Steve Jones has worked in conservation in the UK and overseas for two decades, promoting wildlife-friendly farming and designated site conservation in the UK, and large mammal conservation in the tropics. He writes on wildlife-friendly farming, land sparing and rewilding at https://naturalareasblog.wordpress.com Making space for wild nature in England’s wheat…
Hen Harrier InAction Plan
Sometimes something is so awful that you just hope it will go away – and that’s how I feel about the Defra Hen Harrier InAction Plan which fails to address the real problem for the Hen Harrier – that it is illegally killed by grouse shooting interests because it eats Red Grouse that they would…
Brexit, CAP and grouse moors 2
The disappearance of income support for grouse moors in a post-Brexit world is apparently on the cards – and is a sound policy route to follow as a small aspect of making our money work better for taxpayers, consumers and farmers alike. But the other side of the coin is that more money should be…
Guest blog – Food for Thought by Miles King
Lately I have been eating porridge for breakfast. I had forgotten how much I liked it, but there is another reason for having taken it up again. Oats are very good, apparently, at helping to restore gut flora and as I have been recovering from an infection which meant taking an awful lot of antibiotics…
Defra’s year
I asked a bunch of NGOs what they thought were Defra’s greatest achievements of 2016; The GWCT, BASC, Butterfly Conservation and Plantlife were, apparently, stumped as they couldn’t come up with anything. I also asked Defra themselves and they said they’d get back to me – but they…
Guest blog – ‘I would teach them to shoot’ by Brian Watmough
Brian writes: I started birding in the 1960s watching pink-footed geese on the Lancashire mosses. Today I watch Brent Geese on the Kent coast, in between I have been lucky to enjoy birds in many places. “I would teach them to shoot and handle a gun,”Bob answered. We were three baby boomers sitting round…
Peak bogs
Bob Berzins posted this earlier today as part of a comment on Ian Parsons’s blog about disturbance yesterday; ‘Last Saturday found me on a remote moor in the north east peak. The only other person around was a gamekeeper, with gun in his ATV. He had been putting down medicated grit. When I was a…