These are difficult times for sure, and self isolation isn’t easy. As a community we’re more inclined to be outdoors than indoors - that’s for sure (stir crazy comes to mind:) ). So here’s our little handy HAMS guide to things you can be doing that are at least hunting related. If it stops another self-inflicted bowl haircut or someone pouring vegetable oil on their kitchen floor (really!) we’ll have done our job… 

A short introduction and explanation of Green Capital and importantly, how it will impact you.

Guest Post written by: Ian Thomas, Chartered Forester and Chartered Environmentalist.

In order to successfully manage wildlife populations in a specific area, it is essential to know the diet of the given species, so we can effectively manage their habitat. One of the scientific methods to analyse the diet composition of herbivores is to investigate the faeces. Let’s see the steps of a microscopic analysis.

As part of our ongoing series of articles, voices from the community, Katie Burrows (@katie_burrows16) shares her experiences and thoughts as a vegan that understands why hunting plays an essential role in wildlife conservation.

Okay, so I’m going to start this guest post with a few questions and I’d love you to answer them - honestly - because for a lot of us we often forget the reasons behind what we do. Why do you love field sports? ...

The future of wildlife is at stake.

Until we start harvesting game populations responsibly, we will never be able to manage wildlife in a sustainable manner.

This article takes an indepth look at the effects of over and under shooting game populations.

And, most importantly, what we should be doing instead.

This article looks at adaptive management in wildlife conservation and provides a guide for the most optimum system of game management.

Hunting has been carried out for centuries and continues to play a vital part in the management of wildlife. Passed on through generations upon generations of families, it is still an important tradition.

However, if we want to continue, we need to proactively participate in responsible and accountable management based on numbers and facts. Because whether we like it or not, game management is about the numbers, year-by-year, season-by-season.

So, what numbers should we be collecting?

And what can we do with them?

In this article here at HAMS we are going to take a look at what monitoring and data collection means for wildlife management and what we can do with these numbers.

And lastly, why it’s so darn important.

Hunting has always been a way of life, it has dominated the course of human evolution for millions of years and is still a way of life for many millions of people closely connected to nature and the animal world.

It is also common knowledge that our ancestors were hunter-gatherers who used tools to obtain food, however, what is less commonly known is that the laws to manage animal populations were only established much, much later when modern humans noticed that certain species had started to decline, and in some cases, disappear.

So, in light of this knowledge, what would be the consequences if we stopped hunting?

What would happen to the wildlife populations and the land they live on if, as many that are opposed to hunting, we stopped intervening?

We often talk about how to manage wildlife populations, and we’ve even discussed these topics in some length here on HAMS Blog. However, we quite often fail to fully discuss one of the most important topics: what are the requirements for having a specific type of game on our land, what are the features of the habitat they require and what should we do to get the most out of our land?

So, in this article, we are going to take a look at what habitat actually is and how important good habitat management is when managing our game populations.