Upland Keeper

Civil servants need only to be indifferent to matters such as licences to have a potentially damaging effect on our protected bird numbers

- Lindsay Waddell

Despite what some may think it gives me little pleasure to once more take our civil servants to task for their decisions. However, as long as they continue to make glaring errors that is what will happen.

You may recall in a previous piece I noted that anyone who manages a notified site has to apply for individual licenses to take certain species of predatory birds. When I followed up the point made by a licensing official about why you would kill magpies, I was even more astounded to find out that no licenses would be issued before the start of the bird breeding season, which they stated was the first of April!

Here we have civil servants who, by a quirk of the law. have become the managers of our most important wildlife sites — and they, or at least some of them, know very little about their subject.

It is a dangerous situation when the potential for personal bias, or individual decisions, may impact the future of many of our most vulnerable species.

Alien landscape