Yesterday afternoon the Food Standards Agency (FSA) published revised guidance on eating game shot with lead. It starts: ‘The Food Standards Agency is advising people that eating lead-shot game on a frequent basis can expose them to potentially harmful levels of lead. The FSA’s advice is that frequent consumers of lead-shot game should eat less…
Tag: shooting
Lead poisoning still killing lots of birds and FSA advice on human health impacts ‘delayed’.
A just-published study reveals that lead gunshot is still a threat to wild waterbirds in the UK, over a decade after the use of lead gunshot was banned in wetlands and for shooting wildfowl in England ( similar but slightly different legislation pertains elsewhere in the UK). Waterfowl ingest spent lead shot whilst feeding. Sometimes…
Turtle doves under fire
I haven’t seen a turtle dove in Northamptonshire this year and it seems I am not the only one. This was a bird that I didn’t see in the north Somerset countryside where I grew up. It was only when we came on holiday to East Anglia that I saw my first turtle dove –…
Guest Blog – response to Mark Avery by Magnus Linklater
Magnus Linklater is a former editor of The Scotsman and Scottish Editor of The Times. He is trustee of an estate in Perthshire, and a regular commentator on rural affairs. I knew that taking on the RSPB would be nothing but trouble. But I was not quite prepared for the volume and ferocity of…
Wuthering Moors 27
Blogs entitled ‘Wuthering Moors’ form a series of articles about the Walshaw Moor Estate and its relationship with Natural England and Defra. The Observer published this letter from a sizeable group of Hebden Bridge residents who are concerned that the management of nearby grouse moors including Walshaw Moor has increased the risk of flooding for…
Wuthering Moors 23
Natural England spent over £1m of your money pursuing legal action against the Walshaw Moor Estate for alleged breaches (but a mere 43 of them) of the Wildlife and Countryside Act and the Habitats Directive. The alleged offences related to the building of tracks, paths, car parks, grips, ponds, butts and other associated infrastructure for…
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…
Buzzards – where next?
Yesterday Defra did a U-turn on their proposals to investigate buzzard control for the benefit of pheasants. It’s not easy for governments to do U-turns, although this one is getting the hang of it, and we should thank Defra Minister, Richard Benyon for his re-think. Thank you! The RSPB did a good job, after being…
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…
Maybe no harriers in England? Lead poisoning suspected. And a bit of wuthering.
The news that there may be no hen harriers nesting in England this year is sad but this day, if it has come, was going to come soon. Of course, extinction in England is a bit of an odd thing as England is ‘just’ a line on a map and on other sides of that…