GWCT News Blog

GWCT Wales Director Sue Evans will be sharing the key findings from a new report into what game shooting means for Welsh people and the countryside at an online event taking place on Thursday 21 January.

The GWCT has produced a survey to capture the detail of General Licences in Wales. As with the previous consultation, we will collate and anonymise the information before putting it into a report. The closing date for our survey is 10th January.

We have been asked by the ‘Welsh Partnership of Local Marine Protected Areas’ (funded by Welsh Government) to undertake a study into the ‘Effects of COVID 19 on litterpicking activities on the Welsh Coastline and Rivers’.

Our fencing trial started in 2016. In 2015 and 2016, Curlew Country monitored over 30 nests, and no chicks fledged from any of them. Each year only three nests got beyond egg stage to hatch chicks.

Curlew Country, which launches its webcam programme once again this week, has done an amazing job in getting boots on the ground – practical, hands-on working with farmers and land managers – to recover these much-loved birds that have almost disappeared from our countryside.

Everyone is worried about curlew in Wales – our breeding population has seen a 62 percent decline over the past 25 years.

On 1^st April Lesley Griffiths the Minister for Environment, Energy and Rural Affairs published a press release stating that there are a series of emergency measures to support Welsh farmers during the coronavirus (Covid-19) outbreak. 

On 3 February Wild Justice – the campaign group founded by Chris Packham, Mark Avery and Ruth Tingay – escalated their challenge of the use of General Licences in Wales. The group instructed its solicitors to write to Natural Resources Wales (NRW), claiming that “the 2020 Replacement Licences are in effect licences to cull without limit” and that the licences are unlawful.