Shooting Times & Country Magazine
Housing order means all further releases banned
The release of gamebirds is now illegal across the whole of England, as stricter restrictions to deal with avian influenza have come into force
An England-wide housing order has been put in place, forcing all birdkeepers to house poultry and captive birds indoors and prohibiting the release of any gamebirds. The order has come as the avian influenza outbreak continues to worsen.
East Anglia remains by far the most severely affected region; however, over the past seven days multiple new outbreaks have been detected in flocks of birds across the country. There are now control zones in place from the Orkney Islands in the north to Plymouth in the south, and from the Isle of Lewis in the west to Lowestoft in the east.
Announcing the introduction of the housing order, the UK’S chief vet officer Christine Middlemiss said: “We are now facing this year the largest-ever outbreak of bird flu. Scrupulous biosecurity and separating flocks in all ways from wild birds remain the best forms of defence. Whether you keep just a few birds or thousands, from Monday, 7 November onwards you must keep yours indoors.”
In England, captive gamebirds must now be housed securely and any birds still held in pens cannot be released. In-season releasing, sometimes referred to as ‘topping up’, to replace shot birds is widely viewed as bad practice; however, it has been used by some shoots in the past to increase the availability of birds for shooting.
Different rules affect Wales, Northern Ireland and Scotland.
A number of outbreaks in wild or released pheasants have continued to be recorded.
The publicly available data does not indicate how many birds were involved in each outbreak; however,
Shooting Times has received reports of some severe outbreaks among pheasants, and gamekeepers are urged to remain vigilant and to report any concerns promptly. Currently the outbreak does not prevent shoots taking place, and Shooting Times understands there are no plans to curtail game shooting or pest control activities at the moment.
Cases have also been rapidly increasing in France, with the key gamebird-producing regions being severely affected yet again.
Matt Cross
“Gamekeepers are urged to report any concerns promptly”
Cutting heather, widely promoted as an environmentally friendly alternative to burning, damages vital peat-forming mosses, according to scientists who have studied the practice.
Increased restrictions and intense political pressure have led to a reduction in the use of burning to manage heather and its replacement with cutting using tractormounted ‘swipes’. The scientists looked at the mix of mosses and heather on two grouse moors in Upper Teesdale. These moors both had multiple sites where heather had been cut.
They compared the cut plots with uncut ‘control plots’, which were next to them. The scientists carefully recorded the depth of the moss and also its microtopography — the mix of hummocks and hollows. They found there was less moss on cut sites than on uncut ones, and that there were fewer of the microhabitats created by the uneven surface of the moss.
They believe this was partly caused by the weight of the machinery and partly by the mower’s scalping effect. A healthy moss layer is vital to bogs’ ability to sequester carbon and trap water.