Today would be the first day of the Pheasant shooting season were it not a Sunday – so in practice it starts tomorrow. I hope you have all been driving carefully to protect the 40 million or so non-native Pheasants which have been released into the UK countryside so that c25 million of them can…
Tag: pheasants
A plague around all our houses?
You have to smile a little at the enthusiasm with which the Daily Mail and Daily Telegraph (not online) trumpet the problems caused by ‘alien’ species. The ‘battle to stop foreign invaders killing off native British wildlife’ is costing £1.7bn a year apparently, including £70m to get rid of Japanese Knotweed ahead of the Olympics….
Pheasants in the balance
State of the UK’s Birds 2012 is full of interesting information. I was struck by the analysis of the number and weight of birds in the UK as a whole. In the early 1970s there were about 105 million pairs of birds in the UK – now there are around 83 million. More than a…
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…
Birdwatch
My latest column in Birdwatch (the one with the Sabine’s gull on the cover) discusses whether we should like pheasants or not – I’d like them more if they weren’t full of lead. I wrote in BBC Wildlife a few months ago about pheasants too – now there are lots of letters on the subject…
Pheasants
Remember there was a bit of fuss about pheasants and buzzards back in May? Around that time I was writing an article for BBC Wildlife magazine about pheasants! Now the article is out in the September (!) BBC Wildlife. Pheasants are amazing birds. They are tasty, beautiful and interesting. They are also amazingly abundant in…
Going cuckoo – or gone cuckoo?
We are within days of the summer solstice and I haven’t had my spring yet! There’s plenty of time for there to be a baking hot summer but I am not necessarily expecting it. And it’s turning out to be a funny old spring/summer. For a start, England have played two games of football and…
Pheasants, buzzards and Defra
Yesterday, I was supposed to be thinking about pheasants as I am writing a fantastically interesting article about them for a well-known and excellent wildlife magazine. And following the disclosure of Defra’s wrong-headed plans to pour £375k of taxpayers’ money into a study of how to allow more pheasants to be shot and fewer to…