Author: RaptorPersecutionUK

According to the YorkshireLive website, a 63-year-old Huddersfield man has admitted stealing almost 200 wild bird eggs, including those belonging to endangered species (see here).

Terence Potter, from Huddersfield, appeared at Sheffield Magistrates’ Court on 17th February 2021 charged with two counts of possessing an article capable of being used to take birds eggs, three counts of possession of a wild bird’s eggs and three counts of taking wild bird eggs.

The charges brought against Mr Potter, of Cumberworth Lane, Upper Cumberworth, date back to April 2020 with allegations that he took 179 black headed gull eggs, four golden plover eggs and three curlew eggs.

In Holmfirth, in April 2020, Potter was found to be in possession of a number of items that helped in his removal of those eggs including syringes, binoculars, egg blowing equipment, thermal imaging binoculars and an incubator as well as handwritten data cards.

The curlew, the largest European wading bird, is listed as being under threat by the RSPB website stating its UK conservation status is red.

Potter will be sentenced at Sheffield Magistrates’ Court on April 23.

Potter is not new to this area of criminality. Eight years ago he pleaded guilty to nine related offences including six charges of taking birds’ eggs, two charges of possession of 587 eggs (including a number of Schedule 1 raptor eggs), and possessing articles to commit offences. He also had his shotgun removed for insecure storage. He was given a two-year conditional discharge and had to pay £85 costs.

Clearly an insufficient deterrent. It’ll be interesting to see what his sentence is this time.

[Potter’s illegal egg collection in 2012, photograph by Bob Elliot, from RSPB’s Legal Eagle Newsletter #70]

Press release from charity Birds of Poole Harbour (23rd February 2021)

World Osprey Week celebrates Ospreys as they make their spring migrations to their nesting grounds.

Founded by the Leicestershire and Rutland Wildlife Trust, who are celebrating the 25th anniversary of their Osprey reintroduction project this year, the week-long event aims to enthuse and educate people, in particular children, about this brilliant bird of prey. From tracking treacherous migrations, to understanding their repopulation of Scotland, the week provides an opportunity to weave the excitement of Ospreys into learning about geography, history and science.

Each weekday, from the 22nd to the 26th March, we’ll be sharing a video and content pack about a different topic, featuring activities and competitions. For some extra fun, the competition winners will be announced by Chris Packham and Megan McCubbin in The Reintroduction and Rewilding Summit on Saturday 10th of April. More information on this topic will be announced soon…

Who’s involved?

We’ve connected with 5 other Osprey groups this year to form an Osprey Network – Leicestershire and Rutland Wildlife Trust, Cumbria Wildlife Trust, Glaslyn Wildlife, Osprey Leadership Foundation and Scottish Wildlife Trust… and hopefully some familiar Ospreys!

How can you participate?

All of the involved sites will be putting out WOW content through their websites and social media each day of the week from 22nd of March. All sites in the network will be putting out the same content, with a few personal touches, so we recommend keeping an eye on the page of the site closest to you!

Each group is also reaching out to local schools, who we hope will be able to use the content as part of their school day. If you know of a school that would be interested in participating in World Osprey Week, please get in touch with us at bophhq@birdsofpooleharbour and amustard@lrwt.org.uk Please note that most of the WOW content will be aimed at children of a primary school age, though anyone is welcome to get involved.

Don’t worry about missing out on the fun if a particular school isn’t participating – all the activities will be able to done from home. We hope you can get involved!

ENDS

A year ago, nine UK game-shooting organisations made a massive u-turn after years and years and years of defending the use of toxic lead ammunition, and said they wanted to drag the industry into the 21st Century by making a five-year voluntary transition away from lead ammunition (see here).

A lot of us were sceptical because (a) we rarely trust anything the industry tells us; (b) previous ‘voluntary bans’ by the industry on a number of issues have been unsuccessful (e.g. see here, here and here); (c) the ongoing failure of the shooting industry to comply with current regulations on many issues, including the use of lead ammunition over wetlands (here), means there should be absolutely zero confidence in its ability and/or willingness to stick to any notional voluntary ban; (d) the Scottish Gamekeepers Association refused to sign up to the proposed five-year transition period because they believe there is insufficient evidence to support the claim that lead can have damaging impacts on humans, wildlife and the environment (here); and (e) in the very same year that nine shooting organisations committed to the five-year transition, BASC announced it was set to fight a proposed EU ban on the use of lead ammunition on wetlands (see here).

Fortunately for us, a new project has been established to monitor the professed voluntary five-year transition from toxic lead to non-lead ammunition in the UK. Called SHOT-SWITCH, the project intends to test wild-shot pheasants offered for sale across Britain each year and determine if they have been killed using toxic lead or non-lead shotgun ammunition. Interestingly, the project is supported by funds from the RSPB, Waitrose (who you’ll recall are the only supermarket to be heading towards a ban on selling game meat shot with lead ammunition (see here) and Lincolnshire Game.

To find out more about the SHOT-SWITCH project please visit the webpage here

The project is being led by three prominent scientists who have been studying the effects of toxic lead ammunition for years – Professor Rhys Green, Professor Debbie Pain and Dr Mark Taggart – and today they have published the results of the first year’s study.

It doesn’t look good for the shooting industry. Of 180 pheasant carcasses examined, 179 were shot with lead ammunition.

These results have been reported in the press (BBC news here) and Mark Avery’s take is also well worth a read (here).

[Lead shot pellets removed from a pheasant carcass. Photo by Rhys Green]

The study results have been published by Conservation Evidence and the paper is open access, meaning nobody has to pay to read it.

I thoroughly recommend reading it – especially the introductory background section which provides a well-written overview of the recent science and politics associated with this issue. The paper can be downloaded here:

Project SHOT-SWITCH is completely separate to Wild Justice’s project examining Sainsbury’s gamebird meat for toxic lead ammunition (see here) although obviously there are many parallels.

Another new article, another new audience.

This time it’s an article published yesterday on Mancunian Matters, an online news website covering the Greater Manchester region.

Journalist Deniz Kose focuses attention on the work of local group Moorland Monitors, who describe themselves as a ‘grassroots community network working to protect persecuted wild species and wild spaces on driven grouse shooting estates’.

The article is worth a read (here) – it includes commentary from volunteer Bob Berzins about South Yorkshire Police’s ‘failure to act’ after the discovery of several illegally-set spring traps on a grouse moor in January 2019, which again serves to highlight the stark contrast between police forces – some are excellent and always right on top of their game, others, well, not so much, not all of the time.

It’s been that way for years, with enforcement in some forces seemingly based on an individual officer’s personality and/or links to the shooting industry rather than on upholding statutory regulation. It’s an issue that Chief Inspector Kevin Kelly, the new head of the National Wildlife Crime Unit, needs to get to grips with.

The Mancunian Matters article is likely to rile up the grouse shooting industry, not just because of its provocative headline but because it’s based on the testimony of the Moorland Monitors – a group that is utterly despised by the shooting industry. So much so that the Countryside Alliance, notorious for its unpleasantness, launched an e-lobby campaign in early February urging members to sign a petition asking Patagonia’s CEO to ‘immediately end both its promotion of, and working relationship with, Moorland Monitors’ after they found out that Patagonia had given a grant to the Moorland Monitors to help fund their work. Interestingly, the petition now seems to have vanished and Patagonia is still promoting the Moorland Monitors on the Patagonia website (here).

Still, I’ll bet that the hysteria generated by the Mancunian Matters article will be nothing in comparison to that generated yesterday by me posting the video of The Lounge Society, a teenage punk band from Yorkshire expressing their creative views on grouse shooting (see here).

In the video, the teenagers depict grouse shooters as rich, greedy, alcohol-swigging, blue-blooded, tweed-wearing toffs (that’s their interpretation, not mine) and the red grouse are symbolised by four lads (the band) wearing red/orange jumpsuits (the red grouse, geddit?). The grouse shooters use fake guns and pretend to chase, shoot and kill the lads in the red/orange jumpsuits (the grouse). But when the grouse shooters are sitting enjoying their lunch, the lads in red/orange jumpsuits (the grouse) come back to life and use fake guns to shoot the grouse shooters before walking off in to the sunset.

By sharing this video on this blog (and that’s all I did – share a video that’s been online for months – I didn’t produce or direct it!) according to some grouse shooting industry trolls it’s an indication that I’m ‘inciting violence against gamekeepers‘ and that I should be reported to the police, Government Ministers and probably MI5. Honestly, that is what has been written! These guys need to get a grip. It is interesting, though, to see them go in to meltdown over a music video showing some lads, representing zombie red grouse, using fake guns to pretend to shoot at some fake grouse shooters, but when real threats are made to real people, in real life, by people with access to real guns, (e.g. see here and here) not a word is spoken.

I think that puts the faux outrage in to perspective, don’t you? Especially when those real threats have come from some of the very same people now crying over a music video.

For those who missed it, here’s the video again. Take a look and make up your own mind:

More and more, we’re seeing local residents and moorland communities finding courage and speaking out against the grouse shooting culture and its associated criminality that dominates and damages their daily lives.

We’ve heard from local communities in the Yorkshire Dales National Park (see here and here), from a community in the Nidderdale Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty (see here), from a local community in the North York Moors National Park (here), and from the community at Leadhills in South Lanarkshire (here).

Here’s another example, this time from a punk band (The Lounge Society) created by teenagers who’ve grown up in West Yorkshire’s Pennine towns.

[Photo by Piran Aston]

The Lounge Society have a single out called Burn the Heather and according to an interview they’ve done with the NME ‘it takes aim at local landowners’ pre-grouse shooting ritual of burning the moor-top heather, with deerstalkers, wellies and tweed jackets in the accompanying video’.

NME asked guitarist Herbie May, ‘How did Burn the Heather come to be and what was the story behind that?’

Here’s his response:

“There’s a continuing trend where a lot of wealthy local landowners will burn a lot of land for the sake of a bloodsport essentially to shoot grouse and other birds. That contributes to flooding and it’s generally very unpleasant and it can give rural areas a bit of a bad name and we wanted to express how ugly that is. It was just a local teenagers perspective on that lyrically. The groove is quite important to the track itself and to a lot of our music. We really set out to make people dance and make you move while getting across what we wanted to say about local issues and if that has any connection to issues which affect small towns everywhere“.

NME: I guess it smartly loops it into the wider political dialogue right now in many ways? 

Herbie May: “It is something that has gone on in the Tory party, over lockdown there were certain rules which seemed to specifically protect fox hunting. For a time you were allowed to go fox hunting but you weren’t able to play football in the park with your mates, so it does apply in other areas albeit in slightly different physical manifestations. The idea that there’s a class of people that have that much desire to kill living animals to the extent of making such brazen acts like that, it is shocking“.

To read the full NME interview please click here

UPDATE 21st February 2021: There’s more commentary about this video and the shooting industry’s irrational, hysterical meltdown about it here