• This topic has 26 replies, 19 voices, and was last updated 9 years ago by mrmo.
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  • Another missing item. A sea eagle.
  • matt_outandabout
    Full Member

    http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-north-east-orkney-shetland-27142843

    ‘The Bermuda triangle of raptors’ according to one of my freelancers who works on the sea eagle project. 😐

    racefaceec90
    Full Member

    very sad 🙁 if the estate is found to have poisoned it,i hope they throw the book at them 😡

    somafunk
    Full Member

    Feed the poison to the gamekeeper responsible – problem sorted.

    bigyinn
    Free Member

    Presumably the estate / gamekeepers feel the reintroduction on the species is a threat to their livelihood?

    imnotverygood
    Full Member

    Just like most farmers. If wildlife causes them a problem….kill it.

    mrblobby
    Free Member

    It has cost £452,000 to date, with funding coming from the RSPB, SNH and the Heritage Lottery Fund.

    Very sad. Hope the fine is a similar amount if he’s found to have done it.

    bigjim
    Full Member

    The fine last time he was caught he was fined £850 I think, which is a pittance. As with the poisoning in ross shire recently, I’m sure the police know who it is, just can’t do anything without evidence.

    ahwiles
    Free Member

    imnotverygood – Member

    Just like most farmers. If wildlife causes them a problem…. in doubt, or bored, or curious, or showing off, or even more grumpy than usual, kill it.

    Northwind
    Full Member

    bigyinn – Member

    Presumably the estate / gamekeepers feel the reintroduction on the species is a threat to their livelihood?

    Probably. But supposedly it’s not much of a problem- when they reintroduced white tails to donegal, the government set up a compensation fund for farmers, and ended up not receiving a single claim in the first year. An eagle can take lambs and other small animals and pick off weak adults but it’s hard work when there’s fish and scavenging as other options.

    Mate of mine does pest control with raptors and absolutely lives and breathes birds of prey, used to work as a sheep farmer- he reckons the amount of work people are putting into killing the birds is going to be a much bigger expense than the likely loss to predation. He might be biased to be fair, I think if he caught you trying to kill an eagle you’d end up chopped into little bits and fed to the pigs hawks.

    mrmo
    Free Member

    Farmers and Gamekeepers kill things to stop them eating things their paymasters want to kill.

    Note how Mr Cameron won’t let the shotgun licence be charged at market rates but instead expects everyone to subsidise his and his mates hobby of killing things.

    Why are we culling Badgers when the problem is Cattle, why do we allow fox hunting and deer hunting when there are other ways of “pest control” if that is the point. And to be honest chasing a fox across open ground isn’t really a very cost effective way of controlling pests!

    And to top it off they hand out derisory fines in the very unlikely event they get caught.

    tomkerton
    Free Member

    Hmmmmmm I have mixed opinions about this. I keep free-range hens in my garden. I have had one killed and one nearly decapitated by the local Buzzard so far this spring. I would like to shoot this Buzzard to protect my hens if was allowed to but I’m not so I have spent a lot of time and money building a pen with a mesh roof to protect the rest of the chickens. Not an option for gamekeepers / farmers in the article mentioned. Whilst some may disagree with gamekeepers work – if the eagles are affecting their livelihood, what to do?

    But I love the idea of Eagles and fundamentally disagree with poisoning them. Why do we promote one species over others?

    Edit for spelling.

    gwaelod
    Free Member

    Eagles are natural

    Shooting estates aren’t

    edd
    Full Member

    Note how Mr Cameron won’t let the shotgun licence be charged at market rates

    I don’t understand this, what do you mean?

    why do we allow fox hunting and deer hunting

    Both have been banned haven’t they?

    gwaelod
    Free Member

    It costs the Police a fortune to administer shotgun certificates.

    http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/10108764/Cost-of-shotgun-and-firearm-licences-must-rise-say-police-chiefs.html

    A five-year firearms or shotgun certificate currently costs £50, yet police forces estimate they cost around £200 each to process the paperwork and ensure the guns are being stored safely.
    The difference means there is an annual funding gap of £18.6 million to run the scheme.

    CountZero
    Full Member

    I would like to shoot this Buzzard to protect my hens if was allowed to but I’m not so I have spent a lot of time and money building a pen with a mesh roof to protect the rest of the chickens

    Exactly how much is ‘a lot of money’, to put some bits of wood and some chicken wire across the top of a chicken pen? And time? Seriously, part of a morning, for something that’s actually going to be there for ages.
    As far as the monetary loss to a game shoot is concerned, I read somewhere that something like 17million birds are bred for game shooting every year. I’ve no idea how many are actually shot, but it can’t be anything like the number bred; plenty of birds escape the drives and guns into the wild, so predation must be built into the breeding figures, and the total loss to predation must be a relatively small fraction of the total.
    In the event of any poisoning of a protected species, the landowner should be taken to court and fined, for allowing it to happen, and the fines should be punitive, preferably amounting to a years takings from shooting.
    Let that happen a couple of times, and it should concentrate their minds on stopping this happening.

    bigjim
    Full Member

    Hmmmmmm I have mixed opinions about this. I keep free-range hens in my garden. I have had one killed and one nearly decapitated by the local Buzzard so far this spring. I would like to shoot this Buzzard to protect my hens if was allowed to but I’m not so I have spent a lot of time and money building a pen with a mesh roof to protect the rest of the chickens.

    If you shoot one buzzard, another will just take its place. I used to have chooks and quails, for the quails the fence had to be buried deep into the ground to stop stoats getting underneath and catching them. That’s life and nature, the stoats were there first, you can’t just go around and shoot everything that is a threat, you need to set things up to be safe to start with…

    …they still got in eventually though. So it goes.

    13thfloormonk
    Full Member

    How does the predation actually affect the estates? Less game to shoot, therefore more dissatisfied punters?

    Couldn’t they just market it as ‘our game is scarcer because we have eagles etc, therefore we have to charge more per head for each grouse’?

    As a hunter I would have thought this added some prestige/satisfaction to the hunt, as opposed to just being driven up to a hillside swarming with grouse with no natural predators…

    Undoubtedly a naïve way of looking at it… 🙄

    PJ266
    Free Member

    This really boils my piss, I’m no twitcher but I love seeing big raptors in the air.

    I think there should be a prison sentence if it is proven this was done intentionally.

    tomkerton
    Free Member

    Bigjim – I have a flock of Quail too. Cute little things! Thanks for the stoat info. The quail live in an aviary that is sitting on a slab base so I think they’ll be ok. Will stoats go for hens too? And do they come out in the day?

    Wrt to the buzzard, I kill the rats despite more coming – it’s just a question of species.

    Count zero – 10M square 2m high pen. Quite a lot of wire! PITA when they all used to mooch happily around in my field during the day.

    baronsamedi
    Free Member

    How much does a chicken cost £7 – 10 and you would kill a buzzard for that, what kind of values do you have?

    theblackmount
    Free Member

    Sadly, this is only the tip of the iceberg:

    http://raptorpersecutionscotland.wordpress.com/

    geoffj
    Full Member

    The article about the poisoning at strathdon earlier in the week showed a significant police turnout to the estate.
    I get the impression that the authorities are losing patience with the information and education approach and are one about to go in all guns blazing (no pun intended) to nail the keepers and factors responsible.

    Having said that, I find it hard to justify the cost of these types of introduction programmes TBH.

    anagallis_arvensis
    Full Member

    Much of the cost has come from charities and the money spent will help bring in tourist. Its hardly a big sum in the overall scheme.

    geoffj
    Full Member

    anagallis_arvensis – Member
    Much of the cost has come from charities and the money spent

    will help bring in touris

    t. Its hardly a big sum in the overall scheme.
    POSTED 1 MINUTE AGO # REPORT-POST[/quote]

    That’s the theory – I’ve never seen any numbers to back this up and I suspect Scotland doesn’t need species introductions as a USP.

    Now if we were talking about wolves…… 😉

    theblackmount
    Free Member

    Has all but nothing to do with tourism, that’s a side benefit. It’s about REintroduction.

    If you browse the link above its clear the authorities have been working in concert with each other for some years now to apprehend serial culprits in particular. However, they don’t seem to be very effective at a.)securing convictions and b.) the judiciary handing out meaningful punishment

    geoffj
    Full Member

    Has all but nothing to do with tourism, that’s a side benefit. It’s about REintroduction.

    Sorry, yes of course – bloody autocorrect.

    mrmo
    Free Member

    why do we allow fox hunting and deer hunting
    Both have been banned haven’t they?

    No, the rules got changed on what was and was not permissible, that enforcement is a joke about sums it up.

    http://www.devonandsomersetstaghounds.net/?page_id=37

    if you read the link a quite telling point,

    When the D.S.S.H was founded in 1855, there were purported to be 75 deer on Exmoor. The hunt was a subscription pack where everyone was included and the farmers who kept and fed the deer on their land were encouraged to join the hunt and thereby not to shoot the deer or allow poachers on their land. By the 1870?s the herd had grown to 1000 or more and ever since the red deer and the stagshead have been synonymous with Exmoor.

    i.e. the point is not to control deer, but to provide quarry to hunt.

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