Mark writes: John Swift is the former boss of the British Association for Shooting and Conservation and from 2010 chaired the Lead Ammunition Group set up by the last Labour government which reported to government in 2015 and which was treated so shabbily by the outgoing Secretary of State for Environment, a certain Liz Truss,…
Tag: Rhys Green
RSPB Medal winner – Dr Ram Jakati
RSPB honours influential conservationist who saved India’s vultures Today (Saturday 10 October), the RSPB is presenting Dr Ram Jakati with the prestigious RSPB Medal for Outstanding Contribution to Nature Conservation. In the 1990s India’s vulture population was pushed to the brink of extinction due to the use of the veterinary drug, diclofenac, given to cattle…
British Birds – February issue
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There is plenty of interest to read in this month’s British Birds. For example, Adrian Pitches’s always-excellent News and Comment section talks about Werritty, the first successful breeding of Spoon-billed Sandpipers at Slimbridge, our own wild-hacking story, the impacts of a heatwave on Guillemots in the Pacific and much more. But as you can see…
20 years of Student Conference on Conservation Science at Cambridge
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Yesterday I spent some time at the Student Conference on Conservation Science at Cambridge. It started yesterday in the lecture theatre in which I had many of my first year undergraduate lectures 42 years ago. Nice to see the lecture theatre has had a lick of paint since then. I think I was wheeled out…
Waitrose – are you BTO members?
Waitrose is still selling game meat to the public weeks after being told that the health warning it is displaying is inaccurate. For a leading supermarket which claims high environmental credentials for itself, it is behaving badly. What Waitrose claims on its website … … and it’s a bit difficult to see how selling game…
Climate and UK birds
The focus on climate change in the SUKB report published today is a very useful stock-check. It has prompted me to go back and look at one of my ‘favourite’ books, published 10 years ago, A Climatic Atlas of European Breeding Birds by Rhys Green of the RSPB and Brian Huntley, Yvonne Collingham and Stephen…
Compare and contrast
Charles Moore in the Spectator, ‘It would be wearisome (not least because Matt Ridley’s piece last week set it all out so well) to go through how most such accusations about the killing of hen harriers are false, how hen harriers do better on kept moors than on unkept ones…‘ Prof Rhys Green and Brian Etheridge:…
Truss misleads over waterfowl science
There is a very good article in today’s Times by Ben Webster with the headline ‘Lead ammunition to stay despite poisoning danger‘. Liz Truss, perhaps as one of her last acts, and indeed one of her first (as the least effective Environment Secretary ever), announced that people shooting birds for fun would not be required…
Shoot a few, poison a few more
Back to another Tim Bonner quote from his blog in the Huffington Post. I said that I would remind you of what he wrote: ‘Bonner, presumably on the basis of shooting some ducks, regards the estimates of dying waterfowl from lead poisoning in the UK each year as ‘nothing more than speculation‘. Remember that quote…
A friendly challenge to Martin Spray (WWT) and Mike Clarke (RSPB)
(This blog is long!) Dear Martin and Mike Your two organisations deserve huge credit for the role that they have played in getting us to a position where the prospect of lead ammunition being banned, on human health, animal welfare and nature conservation grounds is very high. This has taken years, and consumed years and…