On Monday, 27 February, the woodcock shooting season was debated in Parliament as a result of a petition from Wild Justice that garnered over 100,000 signatures. The petition called for a statutory change so that the season would start on 1 December, citing the fact that the GWCT, and other shooting organisations, had already called for a voluntary delay. Commenting on this during the debate, North Herefordshire MP Sir Bill Wiggin said: “If both sides agree that woodcock are special and should not really be shot until mid-November or the beginning of December, why do we need to legislate? We need to legislate when things are going wrong, not when they are going right.” The debate was opened by Jonathan Gullis, MP for Stoke-on-Trent North. He admitted his ignorance about woodcock at the start but said he had consulted widely on both sides of the debate, and quoted the GWCT’s research a number of times. He nevertheless concluded in favour of shortening the season and “allowing th
With 104,000 votes and counting, the Wild Justice petition to shorten the woodcock shooting season has reached the 100,000 threshold needed to trigger a parliamentary debate. At the time of writing, no date has been fixed, but Westminster must now consider whether it is right to delay the start of the woodcock season to 1 December, reducing it to just two months each winter. The idea of not shooting woodcock before the end of November is not new; the GWCT began to suggest this in areas where there are breeding woodcock as a voluntary measure about five years ago. While there is no evidence that shooting is a problem, our home-breeding woodcock are in decline, so delaying the start until most of the migrants arrive seems a sensible precaution to avoid the risk that home-bred birds would come under more pressure than the migrants. Commenting on the Wild Justice proposal, GWCT director of advisory and education Roger Draycott said: “We do not believe that a statutory change in the seaso
Ryan L. Erickson, age 63, of rural Blomkest, passed away unexpectedly, Thursday evening, May 12, from injuries received in a weather-related accident while serving in the line of duty with the Blomkest Fire Department.