Not so glorious… and what about BanGS?

It’s the Glorious 12th!  Woohoo! And this year is the first year since the 1960s, according to the RSPB, that hen harriers have not nested successfully anywhere in England. Martin Harper, the RSPB’s Conservation Director said last week: “We are only a few days away from ‘the Glorious 12th’ – the traditional August start of…

National Trust – well done! Now hold your nerve, please.

I say again – well done National Trust! The long-awaited NT response to the responses to their consultation document on management of the High Peak is out (click here). Despite being under lots of pressure from men in tweed the NT have, so far, held their nerve and make a robust response to people’s views. …

Wuthering Moors 31

Blogs entitled ‘Wuthering Moors’ form a series of articles about the Walshaw Moor Estate and its relationship with Natural England and Defra. Regular readers of this blog may remember that I submitted a request for information to Defra about their response to the RSPB complaint to Europe over the Walshaw Moor affair. I received no…

Partridges up a tree

I’m pretty sure that most readers of this blog won’t be looking in pear trees for their partridges but even looking around the edges of arable fields you may struggle to see many of them. Despite all the excellent work that has been done to study the grey partridge (much of which is summarised in…

Lancashire’s ‘Bowland Betty’ bites the Yorkshire dust

A female hen harrier raised in the Forest of Bowland, Lancashire, last year, and fitted with a satellite tag, was found dead on a grouse moor in the Yorkshire Dales in June this year.  I hadn’t realised the trans-Pennine rivalry was so strong that the War of the Roses included shooting each other’s hen harriers….