Badgers no's down Hedgehog no's up

Cyres

Well-Known Member
Heard on Radio 4 this am that research shows that in the badger cull zones there has been a substantial increase in hedgehog numbers.

About time the scientists confirmed what we all have known for years, makes you wonder what else will beneft?

Also similar thigs happening with kestrels as buzzard numbers soar kestrel no's have plummetted, I wonder how we could prove this theory!!

D
 
To the scientists I say 'no f**king sh*t Sherlock'...state the bleeding obvious, why doncha?
 
Heard on Radio 4 this am that research shows that in the badger cull zones there has been a substantial increase in hedgehog numbers.

About time the scientists confirmed what we all have known for years, makes you wonder what else will beneft?

Also similar thigs happening with kestrels as buzzard numbers soar kestrel no's have plummetted, I wonder how we could prove this theory!!

D
Hooray for the hedgehogs " just spent days rebuilding a pen from the cull last year,
So may be some smart ass is going to tell me how it is going to work then,
 
All of the Countryfile watchers love Miss Tiddywinkle, so lets start saving hedgehogs by controlling Badgers. I like to see Badgers around but not hoardes of them
 
Whatever we say,whatever we do, the powers that be and the scientists always know better. As someone else says, people who have lived and worked in the countryside most of their lives and who know far more of the ways of our wildlife than any Phd student or scientist, will never be listened to.
It is just a fact of life that someone who can quote scientific diatribes about wildlife, without knowing Jack s... about how the creature lives and it's habits,will always win out. You must remember that countryfolk are not the nice people on the "Archers",(we died with Tom Forrest) but cruel and nasty people who go out and sometimes kill cuddly little creatures, and what's worse, actually eat some of them.
I have no real love for hedgehogs and certainly not a lot for badgers,but I know which I prefer, No ordinary person will believe it when you say buzzards kill kestrels,neither will they believe that they are capable of killing a hen pheasant or a woodpidgeon,they only eat worms and carrion. The same applies to red kites which are at the moment having a field day on french partridge as all deadstock now goes to be rendered.
The Lord save us from scientists and so called conservationists,because nobody else will.
 
Whatever we say,whatever we do, the powers that be and the scientists always know better. As someone else says, people who have lived and worked in the countryside most of their lives and who know far more of the ways of our wildlife than any Phd student or scientist, will never be listened to.
It is just a fact of life that someone who can quote scientific diatribes about wildlife, without knowing Jack s... about how the creature lives and it's habits,will always win out. You must remember that countryfolk are not the nice people on the "Archers",(we died with Tom Forrest) but cruel and nasty people who go out and sometimes kill cuddly little creatures, and what's worse, actually eat some of them.
I have no real love for hedgehogs and certainly not a lot for badgers,but I know which I prefer, No ordinary person will believe it when you say buzzards kill kestrels,neither will they believe that they are capable of killing a hen pheasant or a woodpidgeon,they only eat worms and carrion. The same applies to red kites which are at the moment having a field day on french partridge as all deadstock now goes to be rendered.
The Lord save us from scientists and so called conservationists,because nobody else will.


You have to remember, academia rarely goes hand in hand with common sense. :thumb:
 
Question - Hedgehogs eat a lot of birds eggs etc, but they in turn are eaten by badgers. If you have badgers which eat all the headgehogs, do the badgers that remain eat as many eggs as the uncontrolled hedgehog population.

Same argument with Birds of prey - Buzzards will take out smaller birds of prey including kestrals, hobbies, probably hen harriers etc. as well a s phaesants / rabbits etc. But a golden eagle into the mix - they wont tolerate buzzards. Now is one answer to buzzards having somebody with a tame eagle fly it regularly at the buzzards and will they get the idea and not want to become eagle poo.

And as for seagulls - they will kill and predate anything.
 
Question - Hedgehogs eat a lot of birds eggs etc, but they in turn are eaten by badgers. If you have badgers which eat all the headgehogs, do the badgers that remain eat as many eggs as the uncontrolled hedgehog population.

Same argument with Birds of prey - Buzzards will take out smaller birds of prey including kestrals, hobbies, probably hen harriers etc. as well a s phaesants / rabbits etc. But a golden eagle into the mix - they wont tolerate buzzards. Now is one answer to buzzards having somebody with a tame eagle fly it regularly at the buzzards and will they get the idea and not want to become eagle poo.

And as for seagulls - they will kill and predate anything.

Lucky you - this paper, out last week, looks at exactly this question. How do golden eagles influence fox and pine marten numebrs and how this knocks on to the populations of black and hazel grouse

https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Alexandre_Villers/publication/304460578_Guardian_or_threat_does_golden_eagle_predation_risk_have_cascading_effects_on_forest_grouse/links/57739a7208aead7ba06e1f52.pdf

Basically, eagles are good for the survival of young grouse, but bad for the survival of adults.

But of course, some of the contributors to the thread already knew that - it's all common sense. What would an academic know:rolleyes:
 
Don't mean any personal offence here tamar. As i know u know ur stuff.
Do u find all ur collegues (esp from other uni's not linked to GCT research) are as open minded towards predator/prey numbers/effects or predator control?

But do u not think in the UK esp there does tend to be a lot of instutionalsied bais in many environmental studies and amoung many teaching academic's? As well as making tv programmes and off course in conservation charities and is moving more and more into the mainstream public opinion.
No other country seems to be just so baised and skewed against the countryside

I know i spent 4 years at uni and likes of GWCT was never even mentioned, infact predator control was never ever even touched on. The rest of my course mates wouldn't have a clue about the benefits of selective predator control

I done quite a bit of reading outside my course mainly of grouse/black cock/caper (as i still wanted to be a grouse keeper) but if u compared 2 very similar studies from UK and scandinvia, pretty much all the studies came to similar but different conclusions, almost all the european studies would put declines down to a mix off habitat loss, predation, and fences, while all the uk 1's would only mention habitat loss and fences and not even mention predation.

Esp with this subject badgers vs hedge hogs, i think there was a fairly conclusive study completed a few years ago and even the hedge hog charities were scared to run/publise the results as the badger cull stuf was just goig into over drive.
I would imagine badgers due to the way they live/hunt could be very bad on local wldlife.
Staying in large numbers in 1 sett (as well as satelite setts) so any bird/mammal/bumble bee unlucky enough to nest/jugg down on any of those hedge running out from a sett stand no chance, due to modern farming hadege bottoms are the most likely place for an animal to nest/lay up but also most likely to be predated on.
With a fox/mustleid or even hedgehog it wil be far more oportunist predation as they will move around there territiory far more hap hazzardly not always sleeping in the same area
 
'The media' - to pull together the mainstream - generally has much better information than it appears to. The problem is often the production line process to get the stories out. In many cases a reporter or researcher will look for an angle and get decent sources who are well aware of the validity or not of that slant, and help to build a decent picture. Once that gets to the desk, it can often be 'adjusted' to fit into a certain slot. And then the page editor or programme deputy gets hold and takes another view. And then the subs apply their twist, leaving it to have another alteration. Meanwhile the reporter is 18 stories down the line and in a different county and might only be called to add a couple of quotes from the interview in for final colour, which end up in a context to suit the revised story.
So something that started as a well-meaning investigation could well end up filling another slot entirely. If it's a slow news day a potentially emotive story could be completely reworked to add a bit of life to an early slot.
Send three and fourpence, I'm going to a dance....
 
Don't mean any personal offence here tamar. As i know u know ur stuff.
Do u find all ur collegues (esp from other uni's not linked to GCT research) are as open minded towards predator/prey numbers/effects or predator control?

But do u not think in the UK esp there does tend to be a lot of instutionalsied bais in many environmental studies and amoung many teaching academic's? As well as making tv programmes and off course in conservation charities and is moving more and more into the mainstream public opinion.
No other country seems to be just so baised and skewed against the countryside

I know i spent 4 years at uni and likes of GWCT was never even mentioned, infact predator control was never ever even touched on. The rest of my course mates wouldn't have a clue about the benefits of selective predator control

I done quite a bit of reading outside my course mainly of grouse/black cock/caper (as i still wanted to be a grouse keeper) but if u compared 2 very similar studies from UK and scandinvia, pretty much all the studies came to similar but different conclusions, almost all the european studies would put declines down to a mix off habitat loss, predation, and fences, while all the uk 1's would only mention habitat loss and fences and not even mention predation.

Esp with this subject badgers vs hedge hogs, i think there was a fairly conclusive study completed a few years ago and even the hedge hog charities were scared to run/publise the results as the badger cull stuf was just goig into over drive.
I would imagine badgers due to the way they live/hunt could be very bad on local wldlife.
Staying in large numbers in 1 sett (as well as satelite setts) so any bird/mammal/bumble bee unlucky enough to nest/jugg down on any of those hedge running out from a sett stand no chance, due to modern farming hadege bottoms are the most likely place for an animal to nest/lay up but also most likely to be predated on.
With a fox/mustleid or even hedgehog it wil be far more oportunist predation as they will move around there territiory far more hap hazzardly not always sleeping in the same area

No offence taken - I've the skin (and some would say the looks) of a Rhino.

I guess that academics are pretty much the same as the rest of the non-shooting population. In my field, Zoology/Animal Behaviour, there is so much material to cover in a 3 year degree course that predator control would probably only get a slide or two at most in the whole course. We have to teach about hormone cycles, learning and memory, mating behaviour, gut morphology, collective movement, cooperation, parental care etc. It's hugely diverse. In a module on ecology, there will certainly be some material on predator/prey interactions and exploration of which is a limiting factor. There might also be material on introductions of exotics, for good and bad. therefore, I don't think that academics are deliberately avoiding such material, but simply it is for most of them and the students just one very small part of a wide field.

I know that GWCT makes an effort to provide lectures at various MSc course around the country. We usually host Nick Sotherton for a seminar for our MSc course and he leads a discussion about grey partridge restoration which encompasses predator control as well as habitat and rearing and release issues. This is usually novel for the students, but in my experience very few are antagonistic and most take to his ideas well.

I've no direct experience of more applied courses such as wildlife management etc. I'd expect there to be a greater emphasis on these more applied issues in those. However, the people that I know who do teach on such courses are certainly not vehemently anti shooting and I doubt whether they deliberately skew their teaching to avoid this area.

In my experience, academics are no more biased than the general public. I know a few who shoot, stalking and game, and many who are supportive of it, if only because of the venison I give them! When I worked in Australia and South Africa, I shot to supply meat for the research groups there - up to 40 academics at a time. Not only did very few object, but most actually helped with the butchery and several were keen to join in the hunting. Of course, some do have strong objections, perhaps based on their time spent watching animals. To some extent, I can sympathise - having done some work with corvids and seeing their 'personalities', I don't particularly like shooting them. Some keepers get the same way with 'their' pheasants.

To my mind, the problems come when academic research is taken up by lobbyists with agendas. Research on its own is generally fairly balanced. It's how it's interpreted that causes problems. This can happen with the usual suspects who may pick and choose or even twist results produced by others to suit their agenda. I think that it happens not just with environmental campaigners, but also with some conservation organisations. Their scientists may produce carefully balanced and nuanced research, but the PR side of the organisation cherry-picks, over simplifies or distorts results. I suspect this happens with the RSPB - their scientists are not corrupt or disingenuous and generally produce robust studies. The trouble comes when the PR team are let loose and convey results to suit their agenda. I also suspect that a similar thing happens at GWCT. Both are membership organisations and so to some extent have to play to their crowd. That is why in some of my posts on here, I try to provide links to the original papers for anyone interested to see the source material and draw their own conclusions.

To your point on Scandinavian vs. UK research findings - one explanation could be that actually in the UK, predation IS less of an issue than in Scandinavia. We have fairly intensive keeping and predator numbers may simply be lower here, even though for any single shoot/keeper the local effects may be serious. In contrast, we have huge pressures on habitat with growing population and recreational disturbance, something much less common in Scandinavia. Consequently, I could believe that effects in the two areas ARE due to different primary causes with predation being less important in the UK compared to the effects of habitat disturbance. I'm don't believe its because UK academics are scared of investigating or mentioning predation.

Re: badger predation - I agree that it's likely to be much more widespread and damaging than we perhaps acknowledge. I hope that someone will be making use of the next round of cull extensions to test this - by measuring wildlife numbers pre and post cull and contrast them with control areas. Unfortunately DEFRA is not facilitating such work, wildlife organisations are too beholden to their membership to want to risk supporting such work, and for most academics, it's simply not in their area of interest.


One last point on academics and academia: There is a common view that either the research is 'so obvious it's not worth doing' or 'bears no relation to reality'. Scientists are usually looking for general rules that capture universal truths. They also are interested in situations where apparent general rules are broken. Consequently, research, especially in ecology/biology involves broad generalisations. For the man on the street reading such work, if their own limited experience agrees with the general rule invoked by the scientist, then they give the 'bloody obvious' response whereas if they have experienced one of the small instances where the rule is broken, they give the 'all academics are morons' response. For example - if we look at rates of buzzard predation on released pheasants, ON AVERAGE the rate is low, I would guess across the UK at <10%. For my birds, I know through tagging, that I lose <5% to raptors. However, I also know that on a shoot who I gave some birds to, they lost 30% of their birds to a pair of buzzards who learned to specialise on them. So we have a general rule; a situation where something about my keeping or local environment means that the rule is broken being about half as likely to explain my losses, and another situation where the rule is broken in a different way. Further research can then look at what factors explain these anomalies. An so science progresses, standing on the shoulders etc etc.
 
The one big difference between the UK and most of Europe, is that in the UK we rear and release very large numbers of non native pheasant and red-leg partridges for game shooting. And with Grouse shooting we manage the moorlands very carefully to produce a large population of grouse for driven shooting. In many cases the population is far larger than the ground would naturally hold and often towards the end of season keepers shoots are required to thin out numbers.

These do provide a very good abundance of food for prey species, and frankly a lot of young pheasant and partridges will make very easy pickings for young buzzards et al and give them the sustenance to learn to hunt and build up fat reserves to survive their first winter. A good friend of ours is a wildlife officer and is the one who issue licences to game keepers for dealing with marauding birds of prey. She does recount several conversations with land owners / keepers where they could n't understand the high population of Buzzards. But on further discussion it appears they provide them with diversionary feeding etc and when shooting rabbits just leave them, along with grallochs etc from deer easily accessible. In her view all that is happening is this is just helping the buzzards find easy food and to successfully rear two or three chicks a year and those youngsters then survive to adulthood. Her advice is not to leave anything about that can help the birds of prey or indeed any other predators and in particular shoot the rabbits hard and pick them up.
 
Cheers tamar.

Ur mibee right about the % proportion being similar to in outside life.

Possibly it is very course/Uni dependent thou?
I take it many of ur lecturers will either have worked with the GWCT or atleast have far more knowledge of them. And mibee different when u get into the realms of MSc studies

Can only speak of my experience but i would say it would be far more skewed towards bunny hugging tendancies than the normal folk i mix with, but mibee coming from a rural/agri area/school and being involved in keepering/shooting its mibee me that is not 'normal' (plenty would agree with that ;)) I had already left school and been keepering but had a few highers not really enough for the course but think got in because of my 'different' practical experience

But on an Environmental studies class of about 100ish i only met 1 other lad who fished and none who shot, and on my group of 8-10 Conservation Management students 1 was the only shooter or even only 1 brought up in the countryside , 2 were sat on fence but the rest were fairly strongly against it with 3 actually boasting about being hunt sabs and getting lifted as faslane.
The vast % of course were city/townies who had little idea of the countryside in my opinion. Pretty much like the Jodie Marsh tv thing, when she see's wot really happens not as strongly aggainst it. Partly the start of this disneyfied/countryfile approach to the countryside

In the 4 yrs, althou really only the last 2 were specific to conservation, course was billed as a practical conservation course, nothing like a spractical as i thought it would be
Predator control was never even mentioned, GWCT was never mentioned. Even doing a field trip which did cover some aspects of caledonian regen and fencing the deer out, deer management was never mentioioned.
Mind the field centre where we stayed had a pub about a mile or so down the road (can still mind the steaks), within a few nights the locals where telling us where all the wildlife was but would never tell the mupet who owned the study centre as he would ruin it by taking bus loads of kids/students up to them

In hindsight i mibee should of spoke up more for it but in honesty spent large ammounts of time drunk or hungover :D Happy days

But if even a slightly higher % of townies or bunny huggers go to uni, they will be more likely to go on to teach at uni or set legislation etc so making the situation worse.
Pretty sure Ronnie Rose said something similar in his book, that sometime about the 70's a large ammount of academics suddenly started to change their opinions on predator control and we now have the mess we're left with (large numbers of prey species dropping 80+% in 30 yrs while most predator numbers increasing by 100's if not 1000 of % in 30 years)
To many people are scared to speak up when it comes to conrolling animals or standing out incase it stops funding or attracts un wanted attentionetc, look at Proff david bellamy being binned for packham with no quals, same with hedge hog xharities scared to speak out about badger numbers
Or even the way special licences are refused for some bird species yet handed out like confetti for others or even added to GL when far less numerous than some highly protected species

And i'm sure ur right that many PR folk will cherry pick the quotes that suit there agenda wether or not it reflects the full study.
But i also think an awful lot of studies often find in favour for who is paying for the study. Surprise surpirise.

When i was at uni there was 2 famous hydrology papers, both used the exact same results from an impartial monitoring station but manipulated/cherry picked wot/how they used them to argue the exact oppisate of each other. Both were peer reviewed and published so both were legitimate studies.
From memory they were argueing wether forestry work had any impact on sediment loads in rivers (i think or something similar) the 1 funded by forestry companies found it made no difference, other 1 found it did.
 
Maybe the easiest answer to the badger/hedgehog scenario would be to let individual farmers be responsible for their numbers?

Cuts out the anti lobby at a stroke but as we all know it's not the done thing in the UK to let an individual decide it's own destiny?

Saw this the other day from a previous time?

 
Saw this the other day from a previous time?


Gotta love Natural England and their attempts to 'reassure' the public!

"The bullets have a two-mile trajectory and pose a serious danger to humans and animals"

Sounds just like the kind of uninformed FEOspeak I've heard before - never heard of a backstop?
 
I've just received my copy of Broadleaf from the Woodland Trust. They have expressed a view.
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