The League Against Cruel Sports wildlife reserves are being invaded

The League Against Cruel Sports wildlife reserves are suffering from an invasion.

September is the time of year when we start seeing pheasant poults arrive on the League’s wildlife reserves en masse. Baronsdown reserve is particularly badly affected, as we are bordered on three sides by commercial pheasant shoots. These are the kind of shoots where people with more money than sense, pay thousands of pounds and fly in in helicopters to shoot at ‘high birds’; birds that are harder to kill cleanly, but easy to wound. Many of the birds are never picked up and are left to suffer in agony.

Tens of thousands of these non-native, chicken sized birds are released into the Exmoor countryside every summer. Many are killed on the roads, others wander into private gardens, and hundreds of them find their way onto the Baronsdown reserve. A walk around the tracks in Brockhole Wood on a pleasant Sunday morning feels like you are herding pheasants, as the young birds trot along in gangs ahead of you, reluctant to take to the air unless pushed. While it is nice to think these birds are safe from being shot at, they cause a huge amount of damage to our native flora and fauna as the eat their way through plants, invertebrates, amphibians, young reptiles and even small mammals, while their droppings laden with antibiotics change the composition of the soil.

Soon the pheasant shooting season will start and the air will be polluted six days a week by the sound of gunshot, as tons of toxic lead shot falls onto the ground and into our streams and rivers; and this all inside a National Park. It’s little wonder that some of the rivers on Exmoor are as polluted as those in inner cities.