I know that, rightly, many people will be delighted with the news breaking today of a potential coronavirus vaccine on the horizon. I am too, but the news that has brought the biggest smile to my face is that Wild Justice has managed to bring about significant reform to General licences in England.
What does this mean? It means that ‘pest species’ will hopefully become a phrase of the past as the shambolic system that allows the unjustified casual killing of birds starts to follow the science and the law! Thanks to Wild Justice’s legal challenge, the new licences mean that there are now only 41 species/purpose combinations under which you could possibly kill species, reduced from 156. Some of the major changes include: The general licences do not automatically authorise the killing of species on SSSIs, herring gull and lesser black-backed gull are removed from these general licences and treated differently under a better (though imperfect) licensing system which has more controls built into it, rook and jackdaw are removed from the conservation licence (it will be illegal to kill these two species in future and claim that it is for conservation purposes), the conservation licence is only valid (for killing carrion crow, magpie and jay) for the purpose of conserving a list of species of conservation priority. The system is far from perfect but, make no mistake, these changes are huge.
DEFRA have released the new general licences today and they will apply in England from 1 January 2021 for the whole year. I, and probably the jackdaw pictured above, will be glad to see the old licences put in the bin where they belong!