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The death of Percy, a four-year-old golden eagle found fatally injured on a Borders estate in April, was a sad moment for everyone who has followed the painstaking work to return these birds to the skies of southern Scotland. But the story of his final hours tells us something that the RSPB seems determined never to acknowledge: when a bird of prey was in trouble, it was gamekeepers who stepped in to help. Percy was not the victim of any wrongdoing. An investigation by Scotla

In the space of a fortnight, stories about disturbance to waterfowl have drawn national attention. A cygnet was struck and killed by rowers at Cookham. Two more cygnets died during the Reading Amateur Regatta, a fixture that has run since 1842. And on Hampstead Heath, crowds of bathers were filmed wading into a non-swimming pond where swans had nested successfully for the first time in years, prompting an alderman of the City of London to call the behaviour "utterly appalling

The government has just announced more than £3m of public money to repair the North York Moors after last summer's catastrophic wildfire. On the face of it, that is welcome news. The fire that broke out on Langdale Moor on 11 August burned for more than 40 days, covered nearly 10 square miles at its height, and left one of England's most treasured landscapes scarred and smouldering. Of course it needs fixing. But step back and look at the wider picture, and something close to

A young white-tailed eagle, G834, fell silent over the North York Moors in the early hours of 1 May. No body has been found. No tag has been recovered. No evidence of human interference has been produced. And yet, within days, the bird had been reported across the national press as all but confirmed shot on a grouse moor. The leap from "we don't know where it is" to "a gamekeeper killed it" was not made by the police, and not by the evidence. It was made by the RSPB, in the l

When an injured buzzard was found in the Bransdale area of the North York Moors at the start of May, the bird was picked up, assessed and taken to a vet. Its injuries proved too severe and it was sadly euthanised. North Yorkshire Police issued an appeal for information, a later medical update followed, and the story was reported across the regional and national press. There was one detail that ran through all of it and yet somehow never made it into print. The person who foun

There is a glaring inconsistency at the heart of the RSPB's campaign against grouse shooting. The same investigatory methods that courts have rejected, that prosecutors have refused to rely on, and that a former head of the National Wildlife Crime Unit has openly criticised, are the foundation on which the organisation now seeks to influence Parliament. An organisation whose evidence-gathering has been found by a court to amount to an abuse of process should not be treated in

Natural England has told a license applicant to fire a gun at a protected bird of prey before it will consider a licence to control it. Somewhere in Natural England, a person sat down, opened their inbox, and typed the words "shoot to scare the goshawk" into an email to a member of the public. They then pressed send. Nobody, at any point in this process, appears to have stopped and asked whether telling people to fire guns at one of England's most strictly protected birds was

This week the Peak District National Park Authority deleted a social media post about wild swimming, took the criticism on board, and replaced it within 24 hours with something better. We said so at the time, and we meant it. Owning a weak post and improving it under public pressure takes a degree of nerve, and we would rather acknowledge that than pretend it didn't happen. But the episode tells us something the Authority might prefer we didn't notice. For years the line from

There is a rhythm to these things. Every year or two, the RSPB publishes a report on raptor persecution. The figures are alarming. The press releases are pre-briefed to sympathetic journalists. The headlines write themselves. And, almost without exception, the appeal for donations follows within days. This week's report, claiming 921 confirmed attacks between 2015 and 2024, is no different. It is a carefully timed piece of campaigning literature dressed in the language of sci

Few figures in British conservation have done more to blur the line between research and activism than Dr Ruth Tingay. Her recent webinar for Friends of the Dales, pitched as a sober account of how Scotland came to license grouse shooting, and a template for what should happen in England, was neither sober nor an account. It was a campaign speech, delivered with the practised fluency of someone who has been giving the same one for the better part of two decades, and it deserv

Watching last night's Friends of the Dales webinar on "Eyes on the Skies", it was hard to escape the conclusion that the charity's Chair of Trustees, Jonathan Riley, has either not read the Charity Commission's guidance on campaigning and political activity, or has read it and decided it doesn't apply to him. In his opening remarks, Mr Riley assured viewers that what Friends of the Dales is doing is "a legitimate part of campaigning under the Charity Commission rules, and per

It took four days for Dava Moor to release carbon that had been locked in peat for a millennium. Four days to undo what a thousand years of slow, patient, cold and wet British weather had built up beneath the heather. Four days to torch an area of land almost equal to what the United Kingdom typically loses to wildfire in an entire year. Scientists at Stanford University have now confirmed what those who work the uplands already knew: the June 2025 blaze that tore across the

A new University of Leeds paper, amplified by the RSPB into a call for grouse-moor licensing in England, measures a wet January smoke plume against an air-quality standard the UK has never put into law. The science deserves a fair reading. The policy translation deserves a harder one. In the wake of Britain's worst wildfire season on record, the University of Leeds and the RSPB have published modelling work in Environmental Research Letters and used it to call for grouse-moor

It is now four months since we raised concerns about Detective Inspector Mark Harrison of the National Wildlife Crime Unit lending the authority of his office to the Friends of the Dales' Eyes on the Skies campaign. At the time, we observed that a serving police officer delivering an hour-long prosecution brief against an unconvicted community, on a campaign group's webinar, raised serious questions about due process, fairness, and the proper limits of policing. DI Harrison h

In a pre-recorded film released to promote the National Trust's work on its High Peak Estate, General Manager Craig Best made a series of claims that range from the misleading to the demonstrably false. The most revealing was his attempt to bracket controlled burning alongside Victorian industrial pollution as a driver of damage to the peatland landscape. "The peat in this landscape has been damaged from the Industrial Revolution because of acid rain," Best said. "And a whole

Stand on the right patch of the north Pennines at dawn this week and you will witness one of the most extraordinary wildlife spectacles still on offer in England. Male black grouse, glossy black with snow-white under-tail feathers fanned and scarlet wattles inflated, are gathering at traditional lek sites to burble, hiss, jump and posture for the females watching from the heather edge. It is loud, it is choreographed, it is older than any of us, and it is happening on a scale

The huge wildfire that burned across National Trust ground in the Peak District last week was on what we might charitably call Wet and Walk Away land. Nine fire crews, nearly a square kilometre of moorland in flames, the A57 Snake Pass closed in both directions, a helicopter overhead, smoke rolling down into Glossop, Mountain Rescue called out, and gamekeepers from neighbouring estates working through the night to stop it spreading. All of it on a moor that was, according to

A wildfire continues to burn across moorland off the Snake Pass near Glossop, in a fresh reminder of the risks posed by unmanaged upland habitat during dry spells. Derbyshire Fire and Rescue Service was called to the scene at 20:58 on Thursday and has confirmed that the fire is now affecting an area of 1,500 by 300 metres. Five fire engines remain on site, supported by two water carriers, a command support unit, a welfare unit and a rural unimog. The Fire Operations Group and

Three campers, three warning signs, one drop in the wind. That, more or less, is what stood between an SSSI moor near Heptonstall and a major wildfire this week. The bones of the story, as reported in the Keighley News, are these. Gamekeepers in Calderdale spotted a group lighting campfires on protected ground. They called the fire service, put the flames out before they spread, and the campers will now receive Public Spaces Protection Order notices for their trouble. A day o

What can the Labour Party's disgraced 'Prince of Darkness' have in common with eagles? Both are case studies in putting the cart before the horse. The latest Mandelson chapter began with the Government announcing him as 'Our Man in Washington' before he had been vetted and (not) cleared. Cart, horse, catastrophe. Which brings us to the eagles. The Government has announced the reintroduction of golden eagles into Northumberland, with a generous budget of at least £1 million. I