what price for a day grouse shooting?

DezB – Member
They don’t look very hard to shoot.. or is that the idea?

they don’t fly very fast.

they don’t fly very high.

they do fly in nice straight lines.

they like areas bereft of trees*, making for excellent visibility.

they’re pretty much the perfect gamebird.

(*i’ve been to many, too many, land-management meetings where a large amount of time is spent discussing the ‘progress’ in the removal of self-seeded trees – in order to maintain the natural habitat)

Finally up here this is being taken seriously. https://raptorpersecutionscotland.wordpress.com/2016/08/03/vicarious-liability-prosecution-andrew-duncan-newlands-estate-part-9/

Speaking to one of the Natural England bods about grouse moors in Yorkshire they said the two they went to were over run with rabbits due to the persecution of predators. Hardly a natural environment.

Quite liked this bingo card…

😆

Ninfan, I scan read that link but could only see an application / appeal for pheasant protection, not granted for chicken protection, where is it? Genuine question, I’m quite interested being a bit of a shooter myself

Are ninfan and Jamba the same person? Can’t be two of them, surely…

Has this been done:
Calder Valley campaigners are leading a nationwide fight to ban grouse hunting

There is no place in a balanced upland ecology for driven grouse shooting. Subsidised playtime for rich folks, unacceptable damage to everyone and everything else. We should ban it forthwith.

Highland man – you need another use for the land if you are going to do that. Otherwise its ends up deep heather and scrub and a mess.

Ninfan is not Jamby. While I am loathe to come to Ninfans aid on this topic – he does know what he is talking about albeit a very one sided view.

tjagain – Member
Highland man – you need another use for the land if you are going to do that. Otherwise its ends up deep heather and scrub and a mess.

here’s one use:

let the trees grow back (or even better, plant them), let the drains fill up, save a ****ing fortune on building flood defenses further downstream.

ahwiles – blanket bog and upland heath are important habitats for a range of endangeoured/rare plants and animals. For a lot of moors this ‘character’ is designated protected by SSSI, SPA and SAC status just letting it get overgrown by rowan, birch and hawthorn wouldn’t add to the biodiveristy. Tnere’s definitely scope to use these areas as carbon and water sinks but just letting all or the majority of the landscape revert to scrub would have detrimental impacts.

One of the few positives of brexit might mean that we can encode better stewardship/environmental objectives into subsidy regimes

Yup – then who is going to maintain it? Trees will not regenerate on many of the grouse moors as there are no local native species to seed there.

Land needs a use of some sort. Replanting native forest is all good – but its not cheap and needs maintenance. Something needs to be done instead with this land

we’re not really talking about areas of blanket bog, etc. though are we.

we’re talking about areas that were once heavily wooded, and are now effectively deserts of heather, thanks to regular burning.

tjagain – Member
Replanting native forest is all good – but its not cheap

it can very cheap, profitable even, people will pay / volunteer to do it for you:

woodland trust – plant a tree

I know a couple of places that have charged over £8m for a weekend of shooting. 😯 and they re-booked for the following year! 😆

The peat moors were all blanket bog, that’s where the peat came from. You don’t get peat in forests you get aereated loam.

Most of the deforestation occurred in the bronze age, some of it will have been woodland but not all by any stretch.

that’s why i said:

“one use”

Its really not as clear cut tho – without a use for the land then it will end up as scrub and deep heather. There is almost no natural land in the uk. Its all created and maintained landscapes

how much management do we think this requires:

?

You wouldn’t get that though, you’d get something more akin to the central reservation of a motorway as aggressive pioneer species would dominate the light and slow growing woodland apex broadleaves wouldn’t get established. Ancient woodlands didn’t just appear over night there the result of, lierally, glacially slow changes in fauna since the end of the ice age.

yes, you’re right. trees are simply incapable of self-seeding.

i’ll be late home tonight, as i’ll be stopping to cut back the young oak, sycamore, ash, beech, birch, lime, rowan, trees that are now growing so fast they need regular, almost weekly, ‘training’ to stop the cycle path getting blocked.

it’s on the old orgreave site btw, as far as i can tell it’s all self-seeded. When i started it was mostly brambles, but after a few more years, the trees are a bit bigger, and the brambles a bit smaller…

(it’s really quite nice to ‘watch’, and i’m quite proud of my developing tree-tunnel)

Stabiliser, can I suggest you google ‘Carrifran Wildwood’. Of course it needs human input, there are no seed sources, but the intent is to replicate what used to be there.

Stabiliser, you have to think a bit wider/larger/longer term. Heather desert is a modern invention and the scrub woodland is only going to be a passing phase, gradually replaced by native mixed & broadleaf to become mature forest, given time. Yes, it would look a bit messy for a while but it has value, especially in terms of creating managed coppicing for sustainable and local energy growing. Take the land back into community ownership (by evicting those who stole it in the first place, if necessary) and support communities to find their own uses. Some might even build trails to support alternative land use… The industrialised land and over-population model currently afflicting much of the UK and many countries is not sustainable anyway and must either reverse or will collapse at some point. Vicarious liability for raptors would be an acceptable starting step in my book.

So, despite decades of ecological research and a pan european scientific/policy consensus, upland heath and blanket bog aren’t priority habitats and STW ‘I know bestism’ has, once again, triumphed over the science. Fair enough lads I’ll leave you to it

all i said was: as an alternative to intensively sterilized grouse/heather moorland, we could plant a few (million) trees. they’re nice, they’re useful, and in many cases woodland represents the natural state.

you seem to have extrapolated that sentiment quite an impressive distance!

Stabiliser, there’s no need to go off in a huff when the discussion doesn’t go entirely your way. The only environment that I have a beef with is the heather desert, which only exists because it has been recently created and then expensively managed to support the large grouse crop that allows for driven guns to have their ‘sport’.
The research which I’ve been lucky enough to have had the time to read suggests that a range of habitats will become natural if left unsupported and that our own priorities can certainly be used to help lead nature into certain outcomes. However, these are not then ‘natural’, whatever that means. Heather desert is an expensive luxury, damaging in several different ways (minimal biodiversity, illegal predator persecution, drainage issues, elitism..) and as it only benefits a tiny handful of already wealthy, privileged people off the back of a large state subsidy, it cannot be justified in either financial or environmental terms. If landowners do not want the land when there is no longer a shooting asset, no subsidy or other support, they can hand it back to the communities from which it was stolen in the first place.

Lovely, cuddly gamekeepers….

Disgusting.

Yup, just heard that on GMS.

Appalling defence from the organisation they dragged a statement out of, in effect attacking the RSPB as having no evidence. Well, apart from the coordinates, provided by satellite trackers of eight eagles going missing in the same area over a few years, and then there being no trace of the birds at those exact locations.

NoBeer beat me to this. Ongoing travesty perpetuated by landowners and their factors. Wildlife crime is under reported and only selected cases investigated. Conviction rates are low and the penalties minimal.

Apologies to the OP for off topic rantette.

D

If this is ‘managing the land’ I’d rather have stabilisers ****** brambles.

Only one more day before the Slaughter culling commences.

Where is ninfan? is he still trying to figure out that pheasants aren’t chickens 😆

you’re all just a bunch of townies, and you don’t understand or appreciate traditional rural ways.

Well, apart from the coordinates, provided by satellite trackers of eight eagles going missing in the same area over a few years, and then there being no trace of the birds at those exact locations.

Whole ships and planes go missing in the Bermuda Triangle, perhaps that’s down to gamekeepers as well?

There may well be no smoke without fire, but who needs evidence in things like this?

But you see, thats what happens – in the absence of any evidence, there is always ‘really only one explanation’…

(Ps, pigface, since it’s obvious that you didn’t bother to actually read the detail of the court case, here’s the formal Natural England technical assessment detailing their recommendation of buzzard control licence to protect poultry on a free range chicken farm, read it and weep: http://tinyurl.com/zo6aph7 )

I have to ask. Why does anyone engage with ninfan?

I mean we’re at the point where he is suggesting gamekeepers are shooting down planes in the Bermuda Triangle as a counterpoint.

well, in the complete absence of any evidence that they are not responsible, have you got a better explanation?

buzzard predation?

Can’t stand the shoots. I live in very rural countryside- nearest pub is miles away, mostly singletrack lanes with lots of fords, so no, I’m not a Townie.

They turn up annually and churn up the countryside with their unsuitable 4x4s before commencing with their bloodbath. They shoot next to roads and village and often scare the local animals- dogs, cows & sheep. Once they’ve cleared off they leave plenty of empty cartridges around and ruts everywhere. The gamekeepers seem to hate anyone else using the countryside. I’ve been chased for using a bridleway on the bike and they’ve put fences for pheasant up blocking rights of way. The whole business hasn’t contributed anything to our local community, despite them taking up a fair chunk of land.

I can’t for the life of me see the pleasure in murdering something that is thick, slow and easy to shoot. A few pages back, someone commented 10 guns and 800 birds, that’s 80 birds per shooter.. I know they are portly gentlemen, but there is no way they are eating 80 birds each. The local pubs don’t sever much game at all, so I find it hard to see how it all gets eaten, particularly when it’s been peppered with a shotgun at 10ft.

they can hand it back to the communities from which it was stolen in the first place.

This explains a significant portion of the motivation of the “anti-s”, good old class warfare innit

As for gamekeeprs killing predators yes that is a fact of life which the police should deal with. I’d wager egg collectors do more damage to bird populations than do gamekeepers.

The local pubs don’t sever much game at all, so I find it hard to see how it all gets eaten,

Most exported to France – if you ever get the opportunity to go around the Rungis trade market in Paris it’s an eye opener to just how much British game meat gets exported