Last Wednesday I attended a one day training event which was run by St. David’s Game Bird Services at Easter Bush Veterinary Centre.
The course was very well attended with a large turnout of keepers on the day.
The course was designed to fit in with the new government welfare visits that many game farms and shoots will be having over the coming years.
The speakers consisted of
Tom Pennycott- A view from the Post Mortem Table
Barry Thorpe- Health Solutions 2014
Jan Dixon- Post Mortem Room Visit
Anne McKay- Animal Health Visits - What you need to know
Ian Mackinson- Premier Nutrition- How to make most of your game feed
Stephanie Mathewson- Scottish Agricultural College- Gamebird Rearing Management.
The day was a great success and the organizers hope to make it a fixture in the calendar each spring. Many thanks to Anne and Gillie for helping to pull the event together.
Last week I was asked by Dr Jayne Glass to speak to a class of Masters Students at the University of Edinburgh about wild land as a concept and policy issue in Scotland.
The students had been asked to analyse the different stakeholders’ views on wild land (what it is, where it is, what challenges/ opportunities the concept presents, how to protect it and manage it, etc ), as well as consider recent attempts to assess impacts on wild land through the mapping of core areas and recent debates about hill tracks.
As with all these things, the students are nobody’s fool and they quickly recognize when somebody is trying to pull the wool over their eyes.
Wild land in Scotland is a misconception. SNH, for example, would have gained respect if they had called their consultation “managed wild land” as every where is managed by man, to some degree or another.
We touched on hill tracks and how, with an expert digger driver and a wee bit more expenditure, you would never know a new road had been put in.
We spoke of how important private money was in keeping our rural economy turning; keeping local schools open and sustaining lifeline community shops. The only jobs up these remote glens can often be for either stalkers or shepherds.
In my view, a landowner could come from Mars as long as he invested his private money into the local economy and managed his estate to best practice and with his neighbours’ interests at heart as well as his own.
This is a win-win situation for everybody concerned and even more so when it comes to stopping large tracts of land from becoming fragmented and our precious wildlife suffering because of it.
In the talk, we touched upon the sheer number of people accessing our Scottish hills and making it very difficult for the thing they were coming to experience- the wildlife- to co-exist. Should some of our mountains be closed down, periodically, to allow some recovery? Some leading ecologists believe so. Should some glens be restricted to organized vehicular access only to give our wildlife peace, as happens in South Africa?
On another subject, I don’t live far from where the latest Lambing Live was filmed for the BBC. It was interesting that, in the same week civil offences for not paying TV licences were being mooted, the broadcaster was flexing its financial muscle. How many BBC employees were needed to run some cables round a lambing shed? A dozen maybe? Twenty max? Eighty people were used and did they check in to the local B&B? No. They stayed in some very exclusive country club. It must be tough being the Beeb.