Blogs

For a fruit and vegetable gardener like me, grey squirrels are not welcome, and I do not much care for them pinching my bird nuts either. Fortunately, grey squirrels are pretty easy to trap, at this time of year, when natural food is scarce.

We respond to a recent piece in The Guardian, in which the RSPB claim to have been flooded with reports of wildlife crime since the lockdown began.

The Uplands team are pleased to deliver some new research. Please see below abstracts from two of our published papers from this year.

Following government advice issued this week, coronavirus restrictions for England have been eased somewhat from 13 May.

The woodcock breeding season will now be well underway. Male woodcock will be roding all across the country and most females will be incubating. Some females will already have chicks, especially given the relatively mild start to the spring. Normally, by mid-April, we are busy with spring fieldwork but under current coronavirus restrictions, none of our usual work can continue.

Curlew Country, which launches its webcam programme once again this week, has done an amazing job in getting boots on the ground – practical, hands-on working with farmers and land managers – to recover these much-loved birds that have almost disappeared from our countryside.

This morning the first PIT-tagged adult of the year returned to the River Frome. In fact, the first two tagged adult salmon were detected within five minutes of each other at East Stoke!

Scotland hosts two thirds of the remaining 5,000 black grouse males in the UK, where they occupy moorland and woodland fringe habitats. The last national survey in 2005 identified overall stability in northern areas, but 49% and 69% declines in the southeast and southwest.

Countryside Correspondent Harry Shukman failed to mention that the scientific paper he was referring to actually found that any pressure to illegally kill predators was both rare and resisted by gamekeepers.