Standing up for Nature
More extracts from evidence from the Peak District – the Peak District Raptor Monitoring Group; In the Dark Peak area, Goshawk declined from 11 pairs in 2000 (23 in 1994) to just 1 successful nest from 3 pairs in 2015; the other 2 pairs both failed due to confirmed illegal persecution. Without immigration of…
The RSPB has just released this to local media (links added by me): The RSPB is appealing for information after a Goshawk nest failed in suspicious circumstances at Dove Stone in the Peak District. On 10 May, a local raptor worker discovered the freshly abandoned Goshawk nest in conifer woodland in the Longendale Valley, which…
The Peak District Hen Harrier Day event on 7 August will be in beautiful Edale. Natalie Bennett, the leader of the Green Party, Henry the Hen Harrier and I will be there – and no doubt a whole host of others too. Watch this space – and also this space on the Birders Against…
What happens in the Peak District National Park is vital to the future of driven grouse shooting, to the future of our upland National Parks, and, indeed, to the future of the UK uplands. That’s quite a claim, so let me back it up. The pernicious impact of driven grouse shooting is now pretty well…
This post starts with a simple round-up of who has said what since the breaking of the faking it blogpost on the Raptor Persecution UK (yes really!) website on Tuesday but ends with a challenge. Later today I will blog on the importance of the Peak District in the future of driven grouse shooting and…
The headline says it all: ‘Reward offered as more birds of prey are illegally killed in the Peak District National Park’. Amongst many press releases issued yesterday by Derbyshire Police, between a couple dealing with illegal off-roading in the Dales and romance fraud, Derbyshire Police and RSPB offered £1000 for information on yet more birds…
The Peak District National Park is failing badly in being a refuge for protected birds of prey. Our National Parks are wildlife crime hotspots because we allow game shooting to dominate the ecology of so many of them. After five years of ‘co-operation’, when ‘everyone’ was working collaboratively to increase bird of prey numbers, the…
The most remarkable aspect of the preliminary results of the 2014 national Peregrine survey (organised by the BTO but I read about it here) is that the UK population of this species has hardly changed in 12 years – a 3% increase since 2002. The last Peregrine I saw was a couple of weeks ago…
As we move closer and closer to Hen Harrier Day on Sunday, Henry met up with friends from the Derbyshire Wildlife Trust – strong supporters of Hen Harrier Day. On the left is Tim Birch who wrote a Guest Blog for this site last year. This photo was taken a while ago and yesterday Tim…
Members of the ‘Sodden 570’ at last year’s Hen Harrier Day event in the Upper Derwent Valley will recognise this area – we were getting soaked just off the left hand (western) side of the map on 10 August last year. The Countryside and Rights of Way Act provided open access to open ground (in…