Courtesy of a fellow LinkedIn connection, Ben Eagle, I would like to highlight a recent guest post I made on his blog at thinkingcountry dot com
It’s entitled “Maintaining diversity in the countryside”.Ben’s blog is well worth subscribing to, in my opinion, as he covers a great many topics relating to farming, wildlife and conservation matters. After all, he was also one of my original Conservation “Young Guns” to look out for in 2016.
Here is another guest post written in the light of Brexit (and in this case, the recent State of Nature report as well). Tony Powell is a wildlife surveyor (principally birds) and researcher and runs the naturestimeline website. He has previously volunteered for many organisations including the Game and Wildlife Conservation Trust, The Woodland Trust, the British Trust for Ornithology, The Wildlife Trusts, Butterfly Conservation and currently volunteers for Hampshire and Isle of Wight Wildlife Trust. In his article Tony reminds us how the farming community has a huge role to play in achieving positive conservation results in the countryside.
Partridge and Pheasant rear and release sites are very much part of the UK landscape. Collectively, these enterprises have planted tens of thousands of acres of woodland over many decades. Woodland, when managed in such a way, boosts the productivity of woodland ground-nesting bird species alongside that of the shoot. Often…
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naturestimeline 
That’s an interesting post. I grew up living on a country estate with woodland managed for game birds and although it was great to see them and find their nests, it was quite distressing to come across corvids, especially jays, that had been shot as potential predators. We lost a couple of pet cats to the game keeper’s gun too! I do agree though that our wildlife would most likely recover quicker if there was less intrusion by people and dogs into sensitive habitats.
Thanks for commenting Theresa, I’m glad the post resonated with you.
Nicely written Tony! Can’t say I have ever liked the idea of breeding birds to blast out of the air for entertainment, but I agree wholeheartedly with the notion of cutting out intrusion into woodlands, especially during the breeding season. We should have woodland set aside for public use and leave large areas for the fauna and flora to flourish, with only the lightest hand on the tiller as far as management goes.