Author: Charlie

Mayor of Doncaster calls for end to grouse moor burning

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In the last two weeks both Wakefield and Calderdale Councils have announced their intentions to push for a ban on burning moorland within their boroughs. Now the democratically-elected Mayor of Doncaster, Ros Jones CBE has written to the government urging Defra to deliver the burning ban “to help stop flooding in communities on the River Don”. Given the major floods in Fishlake and Doncaster, which sit downstream from the Peak District, at the end of last year, this request can only put more pressure on the government to act.

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Buglife | B Lines

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Insect decline is inextricably linked with pesticides and habitat loss. The latter also leads to habitat fragmentation, pockets that are no longer linked and which have less species diversity. The charity Buglife has proposed setting up a nationwide system of insect ‘corridors’ they are calling ‘B Lines’. As they put it “We need to restore our countryside. We need to increase the number of wildflower-rich places, and we need to make sure that these areas are large enough to provide everything that pollinators need to thrive. We also need to join the dots. And that is where B-Lines comes in.”

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Guest Post | Love of upland moors soured by driven grouse shoots

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“My love of upland moors soured when I moved to a part of the country where they seem to be used for driven grouse shoots. I used to pop up on moors looking for black grouse, stonechat, pipits, cuckoo, great grey shrike, raptors and corvids etc, and mammals like fox, weasel, stoat, hare etc. It became apparent very quickly that something was wrong, very wrong. The contrast between what I was used to and what I was now seeing was unbelievable.” Guest post by an anonymous contributor

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North Yorkshire ‘black hole for raptors’ says Yorkshire Post

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This is not what we’re used to seeing outside of the RSPB’s Bird Crime reports or the Raptor Persecution UK blog, but the Yorkshire Post (a daily broadsheet newspaper, published in Leeds and covering the whole of what used to be Yorkshire as well as parts of north Derbyshire and Lincolnshire) has just printed a list of SIXTEEN raptor persecution incidents from January 2018 to July 2020 under the heading ‘North Yorkshire – a black hole for raptors’.

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Yorkshire Post: ‘Another Buzzard has been poisoned in North Yorkshire’

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The Yorkshire Post is reporting yet another incident of raptor persecution from the North Yorks Moors so-called ‘national park’ (it’s getting harder and harder to equate the reality of the disgraceful behaviour of the shooting industry inside this raptor sinkhole of a ‘national park’ with what most of us expect a national park to be). Under the damning headline, “Another buzzard has been poisoned in North Yorkshire”, the Post article explains that yet another Buzzard has been found dead on a grouse moor, Live Moor, inside the North York Moors Shooting Gallery,,,

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BirdLife webinar | Bird trade in Asia

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Has the way we all do business changed as a response to Covid-19? Take BirdLife International’s webinar for example. Sure, webinars have been around for a while now, but the audio and video quality has come on leaps and bounds. They are more interactive. And for those more e-weary members of the potential audience, the carbon savings of not flying around the world to a meeting is well worth the additional screentime a webinar might involve. Webinars sound so obvious now: but if you began taking an interest in these issues when dial-up modems seemed revolutionary, this still feels like a huge advance.

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