BIRDING THE LUNE ESTUARY THE FOREST OF BOWLAND AND BEYOND...............................................................RED GROUSE HAWTHORNTHWAITE PETE WOODRUFF

Tuesday, 31 January 2017

Relentless Killing.

Best watched Full Screen....This is a pictorial story detailing the plight of 18 regional pairs of nesting Peregrine Falcon, and how this threatened species of raptor has been persecuted to extinction to protect red grouse stocks throughout a moorland region.

As the UK Government Wildlife Advisor, Natural England withheld licenses which had previously been issued by them to a raptor protection group of the last 35 years. These licenses had allowed experienced members of the North West Raptor Group to monitor and protect Peregrine Falcon nests throughout the Forest of Bowland.
The Peregrine Falcon across Bowland began to disappear from unprotected territories following a campaign of destruction of nest sites and the killing of adult Peregrine Falcons to protect game stocks. These images show a number of the now abandoned territories that the NWRG had protected throughout the last 3 decades.
Without the support of Natural England and the return of the licenses to this raptor protection group, the destruction of nesting sites and relentless killing of these protected Peregrine Falcon's will continue.



2 comments:

  1. In tears over that video, Pete. I realised three years ago that Natural England seemed to be an organisation that professed to be a protector of the environment, but bent to the will of anyone with money who wanted to achieve anything with adverse environmental implications. At that time they claimed that there would only be a 20% mortality rate for Short-eared Owls as a result of the erection of a wind turbine in an area favoured by these birds, and that was acceptable!

    I don't know where we go from here to stop this barbarism, but point me in the right direction and I'm on board.

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  2. Natural England is the government arm that rarely bends in any other way on many of these issues than the wrong way.

    As for pointing you or anyone else in the right direction....Well, when you've got to the top of the tree of these various organisation's/societies and some are at worst clearly in support of 'the enemy', or at best do nothing about them, where do you go from there?

    I'll resist any other comments for now Richard, but thank you for your feedback.

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