There's been a flurry of publicity for Songbird Survival over the last week - mostly in The Times. This organisation, which I always think as being more anti-predator than pro-songbird, and anti-raptor in particular (but maybe I have got them wrong), may be funding the Game and Wildlife Conservation Trust to cull some crows and see whether songbirds flourish. Good luck to them - but I hope they take more notice of this research than they did of the research that they commissioned from the BTO which went some way to exonerate predators from being the cause of songbird declines. That study doesn't seem to have altered Songbird Survival's views at all.
The Chair of Songbird Survival is Lord Coke. Lord Coke hails from Holkham Hall. The head gamekeeper at Holkham Hall was charged with several offences, including some under the Wildlife and Countryside Act, last week. This has led to some interesting comments in some places (see here for example). Lord Coke's father, the Earl of Leicester, is not the biggest fan of birds of prey, nor indeed of the RSPB. As I say, interesting.
The article in the Independent makes the link between the head 'keeper being charged and the fate of the Holkham National Nature reserve. That's an interesting point too.
A love of the natural world demonstrates that a person is a cultured inhabitant of planet Earth.
Crossed comments Mark and personally do not see raptors as a problem taking one here and there basically,problem is Magpies live on road kills all winter(nothing natural there)then in spring just in a similar way to Sea Eagles take live kills to chicks but of course the trouble is they need lots of easy small chick for big ravenous broods whereas Sea Eagle say only needs one wader a day for chicks.
Whatever people try to say about we have motives for controls that is not the case in lots of instances and I know people who trap them simply to help songbirds in their area and they simply would not do that unless they strongly believed that it had a good influence in that area.