Congratulations to the newly-crowned King of Bollocks, Ian Botham.
Here’s why he’s talking bollocks.
Here’s the King of Bollocks celebrating his coronation with You Forgot the Birds Board Directors George & Zippy
Congratulations to the newly-crowned King of Bollocks, Ian Botham.
Here’s why he’s talking bollocks.
Here’s the King of Bollocks celebrating his coronation with You Forgot the Birds Board Directors George & Zippy
Raptor Persecution UK 
Inane Bottom really is a complete and utter twat !!
Ha! Brilliant, Phil!
He sure talks out of his donkey/horse hybrid…
“missing, presumed murdered”
Hilarious.
Yep, that quote interested us, too. It didn’t appear in the RSPB’s press release (obviously), so who is supposed to have said it?
I understand why the RSPB didn’t think it was worthy of comment but i would prefer to see a utter dissection of this bullshit. It is true he is playing to an audience but there must be some people on the fence, even amongst Toryraph readers.
If you cast your eye over his pronouncements with an impartial eye, he really doesn’t come over well at all. If I was sitting on the other side of the fence, I would be dismayed at the thought of someone with such a shaky understanding of the issues, representing me.
Daily Telegraph readers????
Very apt.
The comments associated with the article shows just which audience he is playing to. Fortunately, the Telegraph’s readership has plummeted, in line with the decline in their journalisitc standards and as their readership dies off. The Sir Herbert Gussetts of this country are becoming rare – unfortunately not as rare as breeding hen harriers.
If ever a man deserved to have his balls hit with a cricket bat!
I read this through last time I posted and was nt quite happy; hopefuly this is slightly improved..
A Famous Grouse for the Glorious 12 th
On our rolling sometime purple fells
The heather mires and moor, the ‘mountain’ hill or side
Wild red grouse very occasionally call and largely hide.
Then there are the bred multitudes for the Glorious 12th…..
The grouse, by beaters driven, to the regiment of line, the barking guns
Flushed birds in hundreds and thousands to be shot to order and with wine.
At this last Somme, butchered, not to eat but for a sport, a blood lust
Lord’s, Royalty and city wannabees, the passage rite, the sign.
No longer footmen and the carriage now its the big 4×4
The “Grouse of the Overcrowded Thousands” are bred on antibiotics
And medicated grit then butchered on a feudal moor,
Land the aristocrats enclosed and stolen from the common law.
This ritual is draped with Royal Ermine,
Across England scarcely a skydance of the buoyant winged hen harrier,
Across Scotland eagles seldom soar the managed moorland sky,
These predators are exterminated by the keeper cleansing hillsides free of “vermin”.
“Go back, Go back”; grouse call within a whirr of short russet, brown wings
A grumbling explosion when disturbed from the heather.
One bird most often, or two, once eight, sometimes three
In the wild wet moors of Wales
Largely solitary and in decline but natural, wild and free.
The ghosts of ancient eisteddfodd, beer and the lyre
A scattered mottled mosaic of a celtic moor and mire
The yellowing sedge and cotton grass tops are white in hue
A golden plover calls lonely to God, “Dieu, Dieu”
His friend “Dozy” the dunlin is trilling at your feet
Then scuttles like a rat through the tussocks and the peat
A bolted “Cyril” snipe rises high, to drum like an idiot on his tail
The rapacious peregrine “Psycho” there his time is biding
So languid limbed hangs “Barcud, the Swallow Tailed Kite”
A bloody cormorant is in a thermal doing a “Jonathan Livingstone”
No more than a speck in sight.
On a white flowered blackthorn
“Elusive” the merlin yickers high on a Cwmdeuddwr scree
While the gatekeeper “raaks” and barrel rolls as ink black Ronald Raven
Over the hanging oak woods of this quiet mid Wales haven
A happy hunting ground a song of this heart
The alleleulia chorus, the jubilation of larks.
“Go Back Go Back” rang out across the years
It took a while to comprehend but after what had seemed an age
Which of this motley upland crew, who might have been the sage ?
Was it really the ever reluctant, short wing flighter and legendary grumbler
Forever confined by a desperate evolutionary circumstance
To tragically only eat young shoots of heather ?
Red the Grouse?
A really niche vegetarian at the rough end of a dietary revolution
Hiding in a not so virtual prison as a member of a trapped avian class
Who now can not leave this heather moor,
Thereby trapped with its annual sporting re-incarnation of bloody trench war?
Who called “Go Back Go Back”
To the mythic hearths of cynefin if you wish to find your heart?
The raven behind me deep in a stygian laugh
Croaked from his jutting crag high on a glowering lee
That with this most awkward philosophic observation
This vegetarian was now due the most high elevation
To his true and noble station as Lord of this Manor.
This to be awarded with a mottled cap
And red badge of the ‘Feathered Fellowship’
As due title to be worn with pride and a martyr’s haughter
In such sage and karmic acceptance of death in a brutal Victorian slaughter.
The night before the Glorious 12th
(NB the acquisition and perversion of profoundly important sacred resonances
concealed within this timing),
That silly old grouse he grumbled as he implored with me, “Go Back, Go Back”
Then toasted the fire’s last flowering embers and raised one very last whisky.
Thanks for re-posting!