30/10/20 Game shooting - both sides of the debate. A pioneering bat survey.

Farming Today

• Episode: 30/10/20 Game shooting - both sides of the debate. A pioneering bat survey.
• Website: Farming Today
• Feed URL: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006qj8q/episodes/downloads.rss
• Duration: 00:13:34
• Published: 2020-11-02 12:01

Every year, an estimated 57 million game birds - pheasant and red legged partridge - are bred in captivity and then released into the wild for organized shoots. The campaign group Wild Justice is challenging the government over this. It says the release of so many non-native birds is damaging native UK wildlife. Next week a judicial review is due in the High Court. However, the Game and Wildlife Conservation Trust says work done by shoots to improve habitats for pheasants benefits wildlife too. Conservationists have recorded the calls of nearly two million bats in a hi-tech project to measure bio-diversity. Forestry England and the Bat Conservation Trust used sound recorders in 16 forests across south west England. They collected nearly 10 terabytes of data and used algorithms to analyse the species of bats recorded. They say this pilot project paves the way for a national survey of bat populations across the country.