With a Welsh consultation on shoot licensing by Natural Resources Wales currently taking place, Charles Grisedale considers the impact its outcome may have
One of the UK’s leading Game bird scientists has looked closely at woodcock shooting in the UK and has found that shoots are acting to protect the UK’s breeding birds by shooting fewer woodcock and by shooting them later in the year.
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Credit: Pip Laker
Pheasants fall into two groups in terms of how they find their way around - and the different types prefer slightly different habitats, new research shows.
University of Exeter scientists tested whether individual pheasants used landmarks (allocentric) or their own position (egocentric) to learn the way through a maze.
The captive-bred pheasants were later released into the wild, and their choice of habitat was observed.
All pheasants favoured woodland, but allocentric navigators spent more time out in the open, where their landmark-based style is more useful. Humans tend to use both of these navigational tactics and quite frequently combine them, but when animals are tested, they often seem to rely more on one or the other, said Dr Christine Beardsworth.