Press Releases - October 2015

A new one-day course was launched In August 2015 allowing gamekeepers to continue controlling rats using professional use rodenticides, after a Health and Safety Executive (HSE) deadline of the 1st July 2016 was introduced.

A new study by the GWCT, with support from Natural England, has identified that the use of pesticides on cereal fields could be having a greater impact than previously thought and that this impact may increase in the face of climate change. The study, using over 40 years of data collected on farmland on the Sussex Downs, considers the effect on arable insects and spiders of factors including changes in extreme weather events and pesticide use.

GWCT Director Scotland Dr Adam Smith welcomed the launch of a Moorland Review undertaken by a sub-group of SNH’s Scientific Advisory Committee.

The once-common wild grey partridge has been in steep decline over the past four decades. Although it is one of the UK’s most iconic farmland bird species, grey partridge numbers have plummeted by more than 80% and, tragically, because of habitat loss and a reduction in essential chick food insects, they have become locally extinct in many areas of the country.