Pl;ease Look Out For Sick and Injured Badgers and Dead Sows With Cubs

 

To answer a question I set up the Bristol Badger Group in 1994/1995 after trying for months to contact the old group (apparently it had folded before 1994).

The BBG does not appear on the Badger Watch listing for the simple reason that I did not pay £50 to continue what I was doing and to just get listed.

Sick or injured badgers can be reported to Secret World but remember if it is sick or injured phone and do not use the online form.

https://www.secretworld.org/contact-us

Telephone: 01278 783250

If you have any other concerns let me know. If you see a dead badger please report it to me and if you can please check that it is not a lactating sow as there may be cubs that need finding and rescuing.

Please pass this along to anyone in Bristol.

Thank You

If Otter Deaths Are An Important Research Topic.... Maybe People Ought To Get Their Act Together?

Pretty angry about a message this morning from someone who "might"/"could"/"probably" and who then went on to explain how important his time was and that he had told some (no idea who) where the dead otter was...it was a mess of a message.

I have sent the following out to Bristol Nature Network and Bristol Naturalist Society on Face Book:

 "I was today contacted, as far as I can ascertain, not by a member of the Bristol Otter Group about the otter I confirmed as being dead on Friday. I was contacted after a discussion at an event (apparently) and it was reported that there was  a dead otter at a known blackspot -firstly for animal welfare and protection I do not give out locations of otters whether dead or alive and so the location was misinformation not originating from me.

"Last year I spent a great deal of time communicating with Bristol pathology and Cardiff university and in the end it was decided that otters should be diverted to Bristol where full post mortems could be carried out (such PMs are a rarity) and Cardiff got the samples it needed and this would give an overall picture of otter health -it would also save the otter group having to store the otters for a long period and then drive to Cardiff and back. I even had someone at the time who would drive out to collect the bodies for them since it can take 24-48 hours at best to get any response from them. I was given a public slap on the face (on this group) for having said the otter group agreed to this. I did not state that.

"The important thing is to get animals who are under study to a pathology lab asap. After a number of hours rigor mortis sets in and even in the current weather flies settle on carcasses and they become "maggot surprises" -we are all too familiar with that ion fox carcass retrievals. On the 2nd February I reported a confirmed otter death and posted here about it and that a vet was in possession of it. I believe that it was four days later I was asked which vet. Vets that are willing, and there are very few, to keep a dead animal in their freezer only do so for about 24 hours so unless a request is made to store for a day more then protocol kicks in and  the carcass is sent for disposal. So 3-4 days later the otter is gone.

"The current otter was reported and confirmed as an otter on Friday. If fly strike and other wildlife have not all started doing their work it would be a miracle. I kept a location map of both and awaited someone from the otter group to get in touch. As a field naturalist and the person recording fox and badger deaths in the area I tend to have something like a dead otter reported on the day of death. Fresh.

"I will keep recording any otter deaths an d make people aware of them but unless the otter group changes the way it works then these will also be lost. I learnt the lesson the hard way about collecting and submission so I hope protocols can be changed so that people are contactable and can go out to recover bodies asap.

"And 'thank you' to the person who contacted me and indeed MY time is equally as important with the workload I have."

Why get into wildlife work/projects if you are not going to bother?

Taxidermists Put Bounties on UK Wildlife

 

As a demonstration of why foxes and other wildlife in the UK is on the decline...

Last week a "pest controller" was asking how much taxidermists would pay for a melanistic (black) fox as there are some in his area. There was discussion that black or white foxes would fetch a better price than a "common red"!   

Today a taxidermy group are advising someone on how much they can sell a grey squirrel for and how black squirrels fetch another higher price and white squirrels more.  These are online groups of people who KNOW what they are doing and in these cases they are setting bounty prices on UK wildlife -supposedly illegal.  

Rare colouration in animals should not make them targets for dim-witted idiots with guns to kill and make money from and when it comes to known black and white squirrels they are in residential/park areas and using firearms in a suburban area is illegal.  

Red foxes, as noted, are not "common" but the numbers are dropping and, again, to deliberately target black or white foxes that are rare as they will bring in some money is a bounty.  

I would encourage anyone noticing people out with a rifle or acting suspiciously in areas where there is wildlife to report them to the police as these people are part of the big problem when it comes to wildlife numbers dropping.

On Fox (and Badger) Extinction -Nothing New

 

 Regarding the previous post on fox population status The results should also be parallel with the badger cull areas as chief zones for killing, shooting and fox hunting . The main Royal estates and grouse estates will have decline in foxes as killing a fox is seen to protect nesting birds that are destined to be shot for 'fun' later.

I think that the problem is if you have shooters who enjoy killing wildlife (badgers) for money then if they are not seeing enough badgers to kill they will shoot anything else and foxes are a prime target. I write that based on having talked and dealt with shooters from 1977-2017 and though most do the work as "pest control" they are not; shooting rabbits all night may earn them money but shooting the main predator of rabbits, foxes, only allows the rabbit population to increase. Unless that is the intention to keep the work coming in? There is in nature a natural prey-predator ratio and that is a scientific fact that anyone can look up online or (dare I write it?) by reading a book.

No one outside the UK understands the badger cull which is based on very poor science and may even refer to badgers as "scapegoat species". A "scapegoat species" is usually chosen when bad animal husbandry and over killing by humans needs to have blame put elsewhere.

If 100,000 badgers killed on the roads you add that to 250,000 killed 'legally' then that is 350,000 and that is before including illegal shooting, baiting and snaring which might account for another 1000 per year(?). With foxes they reckon a similar number of 100,000 killed on the roads and based on what we've seen in Bristol I reckon that is an under estimate and we know farmers like to shoot any fox they see, we have snarers and of course "fun shooters" claiming to kill at least 200 a month while some claim the total in England is 500 'for fun'.

Dog foxes, vixens, cubs -all 'fun' and that means the breeding population declines but the 'fun shooters' are not worried about that as the odd straying pet dog or cat are equally 'fun' to shoot and I would not be surprised if a figure of 150,000 fox deaths per year was estimated. If people were not treating mange I think we would easily see 200,000 as a good estimate of deaths per year and we need to include parvovirus, babesia, pneumonia, heart and lung worm to fox killers.

We know that the Old types of British fox were hunted to extinction (even though the 'sportsmen' of the time predicted the extinction) by the 1860s. The wild cat was, in 1899, officially recorded as becoming extinct c 1860s. At the same time the red squirrel was also driven to extinction and importing these animals to continue the 'fun' was still going in the 1920s. In the case of the drop of red squirrel numbers the scapegoat species became the grey squirrel. This was to cover up the fact that humans were shooting and poisoning as well as trapping and killing red squirrels "because". Today private estates and commercial forestry are still killing off red squirrels as "vermin" -just as the New wild cats are..

The reason why so many species in the UK have "European DNA" is because their ancestors were imported from Europe to hunt -hares and various species of deer that had been wiped out in various areas.

The "Great Scarcity" of 1923 was likely a near extinction for foxes that took decades to recover and hunting records from the 1940s prove this. In fact, in the 1940s and 1960s the number of foxes killed was "estimated" as hunts attempted to show that there were "so many". Even authors at the time gave a nod and a wink to this lie.

Following the introduction of myxomatosis to the UK 70 years ago the loss of the foxes main prey item also resulted in large numbers of foxes dying off and was, again, at the point of near extinction in England.

It is in their 2004 review of the Red fox in Canids: Foxes, Wolves, Jackals and Dogs, that David Macdonald and Jonathan Reynolds note that, globally:

” ... roughly 75% of foxes die in their first year, and thereafter mortality is approximately 50% in each adult year.”

Sadly, the Bristol Fox Deaths Register confirms this. A fox lasting 1 year is known as a Cub. If it survives to 2 years it is an Adult. After 3 years it is considered Old.   I know that people pay very little attention to these facts and that I am just one voice shouting out but we need to seriously -with the full power of the law- preserve what wild species we have left and in the case of the fox place it on the Red List and politics and "financial donations" (bribes) be damned.

I think in 20 years foxes and badgers will be very rare indeed.

Is It Now Time For The UK Red Fox To Finally Be Red Listed?

 

 People keep ignoring what I write and say so it is good when an organisation I have no connection to and which in the past has refused to cooperate with me publishes similar findings. I stated what has been concluded here back in 2010's Red Paper Canids as well as updated it fore 2022's Red Paper.  

The Red fox in the UK is facing extinction..again

“If this trend is real then in 24 years the Red Fox has declined by 50% in numbers – halved! If this were a bird, and it clearly isn’t, it would be on the UK red list”.

Credit Mark Avery, Senior Conservationist.

Yes, At Times I AM "That" Person On Twitter

  Natural England @NaturalEngland · 22h Confirmation of the go live date for #BiodiversityNetGain legislation is good news for #NatureRecovery.

 We have worked with Defra and developers, landowners, local authorities, and environmental NGOs, on the policy to ensure development has a positive impact on biodiversity.

My response: "So could you NOW stop the wholesale slaughter of badgers over bad science and start looking at everything from outlawing snares and people who go out every night shooting wildlife for fun? "

They never reply of course. 

Think Fox