Blogs

Head Chef at Brodick Bar and Brasserie on the Isle of Arran, Timur Jay Ünal, has won NFU Mutual’s Inspirational Young Person Award.

A team of eight Scots have raised over £42,000 by completing a tough 24-hour coast to coast challenge in aid of My Name’5 Doddie Foundation.

It is important that, in addition to rewarding farmers and estate managers for planting new hedgerows, any policy should support them to look after what we already have and improve and enhance existing hedgerows.

The cost of rural theft in Scotland fell 25% to an estimated £1.7m in 2020 as COVID restrictions, rural policing and beefed up farm security kept criminals out of the countryside, according to figures released by leading rural insurer, NFU Mutual.

A spectacular celebration of conservation and the countryside for over three decades, The GWCT Scottish Game Fair, sponsored by NFU Mutual, will return to Scone Palace in Perthshire this year from Friday 24 to Sunday 26 September, for its 32nd year.

From here on in, the two most used rat poisons, bromadiolone and difenacoum will be as good as useless on my shoot, and if we were daft enough to use them, we would simply be risking sending the chemicals up the food chain to the likes of our barn owls, kestrels and red kites, while having no significant impact on the rats.

The May 2021, the government ceded to calls for a ‘net zero’-style target for nature in the Environment Bill by introducing a Species Abundance Target, the detail of which is to be determined and the aim of has just been strengthened to “halt species decline by 2030”.

The Owl Box Initiative strives to be a conduit for collaboration and knowledge sharing between land managers, volunteers and conservation organisations, and recently, I had the honour of meeting with Major (Rtd) Nigel Lewis, a prominent volunteer ornithologist who runs the Lewis Raptor and Owl Group, based in Wiltshire.

I have seen the scenario many times, a lovely little bubbling brook, with a nice head of small trout, but nothing much over a few ounces in weight. The immediate response for someone who wants to improve the fishing potential is to suggest stocking with some bigger fish.

Joe Stanley reports from his new home in our great countryside – the Allerton Project on the Leicestershire/Rutland border at the delightful village of Loddington.