GWCT News Blog

We would like to welcome you to two special events on the GWCT stand on the opening day of The Game Fair, Friday 29th July at Ragley Hall.

“Pheasants are useless mothers”; how often I have heard those word, but are they true? This view certainly has a long history, and way back in 1895 the Rev H. A. Macpherson said they are “careless, clumsy mothers” in the fur, feather and fin volume on Pheasants.

Every ten years the BTO and GWCT collaborate on a survey to estimate the UK's breeding woodcock population. Watch this short video by the GWCT's Olly Dean featuring our Head of Wetlands Research Chris Heward demonstrating what's involved.

Recently a new study was published in Vet Record about badger culling and its relationship with the incidence of bovine tuberculosis (bTB). It was very quickly covered by the news and declared a “landmark study”, with the authors concluding that there is no detectable link between badger culling and any decline in incidence of bTB. However, Defra promptly issued a rebuttal and discounted the study as “methodologically flawed”.

Plug “2022 year of..” into your search engine, and you will likely come up with tiger, Chinese zodiac, ox and dog, but I wonder how many readers realise that 2022 is also the year of the gamekeeper? 

Earlier this year the GWCT policy team was invited to respond to a consultation on Environmental Targets. We feel the 25-year Environmental Plan is ambitious, but it will take focused effort to.

Here are our thoughts...

The earth we live on is an intricately engineered, delicately balanced life-support system. Be it a worm, a tree, a mole, or a bee; a cloud, a teaspoon of soil, or the sea – almost anything in the environment that you can name (even the common wasp) is part of our life-support machine.

After including Land Healer: How Farming Can Save Britain’s Countryside by Jake Fiennes in our newsletter on Tuesday we have received a large number of orders for the new book.

This is the second year of my PhD study of nest and chick survival of curlew in the New Forest. This season GWCT Head of Predation Control Studies Mike Short and I found a total of 28 curlew nests (approximately half of the pairs in the New Forest), compared with 23 last year.