On the last day of October our e-petition to ban driven grouse shooting (123,077 signatures) was debated alongside another, so-called rival, e-petition to protect grouse shooting (which still languishes under 25,000 signatures despite being over half way through its allotted time). Having let a month pass I’ll now return to what was said on that…
Tag: Natural England
Guest blog – Otters by Kevin Parr
Kevin Parr is a writer, angler and amateur naturalist from West Dorset. He is the author of Rivers Run, The Idle Angler and The Twitch (which was this blog’s book of the year in 2014) and writes regularly for a variety of publications including BBC CountryFile Magazine and Fallon’s angler. …
Guest blog – What now for Beavers in the UK? by Jonny Hughes
Jonny Hughes is CEO of the Scottish Wildlife Trust and a global councillor for the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN). Twitter: @jonnyecology What now for Beavers in the UK? It’s been an up and down kind of year for nature in the UK. The State of Nature report…
Guest blog – Disturbing for Nature by Miles King
Miles King is Chief Executive of People Need Nature a new charity working to highlight the sensory, emotional and spiritual values of nature. He has worked in nature conservation for 30 years, leading the conservation work at Plantlife, The Grasslands Trust and Buglife. He has also worked for English Nature, Natural England and as a…
West Pennine Moors SSSI – 2
It’s a rare enough thing these days for new SSSIs to be notified – and now the West Pennine Moors has been notified. Actually, it’s already a day old. Very wittily the document explaining this points out that it is a 7600+ha extension to three existing small SSSIs. Read the documentation and it seems a…
NE issued four Buzzard-killing licences
Natural England, the former independent conservation agency which now spends much too much of its time issuing licences to kill wildlife, has issued four licences this year to kill Buzzards, a native species of predator, because they might be causing serious damage to livestock known as Pheasant poults (a non-native species released into the UK…
Breaking news: West Pennine Moors SSSI – at last!
Today NE notified the West Pennine Moors as a new SSSI. Great news. For a more considered view on this, come back later today, or perhaps tomorrow. A case for celebration. Previous blogs on the West Pennine Moors: Natural England seem to have forgotten the West Pennine moors, 2 April 2015; …
Likely lads
Rowan the Hen Harrier ‘was likely to have been shot’ – likely? That’s an odd phrase and it’s been bothering me (and others, I see). I tend to start from the supposition that all Hen Harriers are likely to be shot and have to keep telling myself that there are other perfectly natural causes of…
Rory Stewart – this one is in your constituency
Rory Stewart has moved on from Defra but his legacy of inactivity on wildlife crime lives on and its impacts are manifest in his own constituency. A case of dead birds coming home to roost? I didn’t have any takers for my 100/1 bet that Rowan died of natural causes. It’s hardly surprising. He couldn’t…
Planet Earth 2
There is just the one planet Earth – and it is a fantastically amazing place. I wouldn’t want to live anywhere else. Last night’s opening programme in the new Attenborough series was breathtaking in its beauty – ‘that’s where I live’ we all should have been shouting. ‘I love that place!’. ‘What can I do…