RSPB logged 200 reports of crimes against birds of prey in 2015

Charity calls for tougher legislation to prevent shooting, poisoning and trapping of birds such as peregrine falcons, red kites, buzzards and hen harriers

Friday 3 February 2017 12.41 GMT Last modified on Friday 3 February 2017 22.00 GMT

Almost 200 reports of shooting, trapping and destruction of birds of prey were received by the RSPB in 2015, the charity said.

Some 64 out of the 196 reports were confirmed, including the shooting or attempted shooting of 46 birds of prey, including 16 buzzards, 11 peregrines, three red kites, one red-footed falcon and one hen harrier, a new report from the RSPB said. 

There were also 50 reported incidents of wildlife poisoning, including confirmed cases of 15 buzzards, four red kites and three peregrine falcons falling victim to poison baits. 

Illegal persecution of birds of prey is still happening too regularly in the UK countryside, the RSPB said, and it called for tougher legislation and enforcement to allow the birds to thrive. 

The charity repeated its call for reforms to grouse shooting, including a licence system for shoots, as it blamed gamekeepers for targeting birds of prey, in particular hen harriers because they preyed on red grouse. 

Hundreds of pairs of hen harriers nest in the UK, but in England they are teetering on the brink of extinction as a breeding bird as a result of historic persecution, with just three successful breeding pairs in 2016.

But in what has become an increasingly bitter debate, the shooting industry says grouse estates spend millions of pounds a year on conservation to support wildlife, and it backs the government’s hen harrier recovery plan. 

The industry says it wants to see a well-dispersed hen harrier population which co-exists with local businesses. 

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GM 'surrogate hens' could lay eggs of rare chicken breeds, scientists say

Radical plan to maintain diversity of gene pool proposes use of genetically modified chickens as surrogate mothers

 

Hannah Devlin Science correspondent in Boston

  

Friday 17 February 2017 17.24 GMT Last modified on Wednesday 22 February 2017 17.37 GMT 

The Rumpless Game is squawky and, as its name suggests, lacks a tail, while the Burmese Bantam, has fantastically flared leg feathers and a head like a feather duster. But the true value of rare chicken breeds, according to a team of scientists working to save them from obsolescence, is not their decorative crests and plumage, but the diversity they bring to the chicken gene pool.

In a radical plan to preserve rare varieties such as the Nankin, Scots Dumpy and Sicilian Buttercup, scientists at the the University of Edinburgh’s Roslin Institute have bred genetically modified chickens designed to act as surrogates that would be capable of laying eggs from any rare breed.

Speaking to journalists at the AAAS conference in Boston, Mike McGrew, who is leading the project, said: “These chickens are a first step in saving and protecting rare poultry breeds from loss.”

The surrogacy technique, which places a new, mind-bending twist on the classic chicken or egg question, involves first genetically engineering hens to be sterile. This is done by deleting a gene, called DDX4, that is required for the development of primordial follicles (the precursors to eggs) meaning that the surrogate hens will never lay eggs that are biologically their own.

A batch of sterile GM chicks hatched at the Roslin Institute in 2016, becoming the first genetically modified birds created in Europe. “We produced a hen that doesn’t have any eggs,” said McGrew, who is first author on a paper on the work published this week in the journal Development.

The next step will be to transplant follicles from rare birds into the surrogate (this is done before the surrogate chick is hatched from its own egg), meaning it would go on to lay eggs belonging to entirely different breeds of chicken.

Given that the hens would also need to be artificially inseminated with sperm from the same rare variety, the approach may appear unnecessarily convoluted. Why not just breed the rare birds the normal way?

Continued 

Ruffled feathers: angry Britons' battle with dive-bombing seagulls moves inland

What’s the answer? Fight or flight?

Mike Jeffries

Thursday 23 February 2017 00:00 GMT

The seaside and cities of Britain are under siege by wild and ferocious predators. Birds are wreaking havoc on innocent members of the public with indiscriminate attacks. Some fearful citizens have even reportedly taken to carrying firearms for protection – from gulls.

For the seagulls’ list of victims seems to grow all the time. Tourists daring to eat ice creams in daylight, fans of fish and chip takeaways, festival goers, school children, cyclists, tortoises, Chihuahuas, supermarket customers, are all seen as fair game from the skies.

So serious is the airborne threat that the Conservative MP for one south-west England constituency called for a parliamentary debate after a friend lost his fish and chips to gulls. Even the notoriously tough South Africa rugby team was accused of being unnerved as their British coastal training ground was dive-bombed during the 2015 World Cup. National newspapers have featured photos of the birds swallowing rats, pigeons, and in one case reported the violent eating of a starling, as “the poor starling chicks were forced to look on”.

In 2015 the then prime minister, David Cameron, called for a “big conversation” about the challenge and pledged a quarter of a million pounds to fight back, egged on by the then Liberal Democrat MP Don Foster. The gull has Britain rattled, and its enemies appear to crumble. Neither the £250,000 nor Foster survived that year’s general election.

The creatures supposedly terrorising towns and capturing the public imagination are two particular species, the herring gull, Larus argentatus, and its very close cousin the lesser black backed gull, Larus fuscus. Both are large, feisty, greedy generalists happy to pull a worm from a wet lawn or dive bomb a jittery tourist into dropping their lunch.

Continued