Baroness Bennet: It's time to halt - or 'massively reduce' - number of pheasants introduced into countryside

 

Baroness Bennett - authoritative on environmental issues

During debates in the House of Lords, Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle regularly speaks on farming and environmental issues for the Green Party. In her latest contribution on January 25, she took issue with other peers who argued that control of predators, such as corvids and foxes, was one of the keys to safeguarding farmland birds such as buntings, curlews and skylarks. Her  case was that it was the artificial introduction of gamebirds, chiefly pheasants, into the countryside that had resulted in an increase of predators. Here is  an extract from her speech. 

As confirmed in the State of Nature Report of 2023, the decline in the abundance of farmland birds is primarily due to increase in intensive farming practices - not natural predation. 

Predators are a marginal factor in farmland bird species abundance for a few species only.

                                                

More introduced pheasants leads to more predators says Green Party peer

One reason why, in some areas, we have such an abundance of predators is the massive release of large numbers of gamebirds, particularly pheasants.

We are talking about a slow, non-native, not-very-well-adapted-to-our-environment feast for our predators, so we have lots of them. 

There is a very obvious alternative: to stop, or at least massively reduce, the amount of release of 'food' into the environment. 

Then we will have fewer predators. 

As an aside, we might also have a bit more safety on our roads.