New conservation award launched by the NGO and Marsdens Game Feeds

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The National Gamekeepers Organisation are proud to announce a new award in conjunction with Marsdens Game Feeds, which will celebrate conservation and biodiversity in the game industry. The Conservation Champions Awards are aimed at shoots, estates and gamekeepers, in a bid to highlight the positive impact their excellent work has on our countryside.

Thomas Welham, Sales Director for Marsdens Game Feeds comments: ‘We are proud to partner with the NGO and hope this new award will shine a light on the huge amount of conservation work that those working in the game industry undertake every day including game bird welfare, their overall focus on biodiversity, woodland management, cover crops and over-winter feeding of farmland birds so it will be fantastic to celebrate their achievements.”

The 2019 Gamekeepers Conservation and Wildlife Report* showed respondents to the survey provide 23,426 tonnes of supplementary food for farmland birds in winter, plant on average 47.3 ha or 117 acres of trees, and privately fund more than £2.2 million worth of wild bird cover, which benefits a host of red listed bird species such as yellowhammer and tree sparrow. 

The new Marsdens/NGO award will help to further highlight this and promote individual success stories across the country. The award will be split into several categories including responsible land management, habitat, innovation, welfare and the Marsdens Special Award.

A host of great prizes will be revealed and the winners will be announced at next year's British Shooting Show in February 2023.

David Pooler, the Interim Chairman of the NGO said: “We are excited to team up with Marsdens, who are leaders in their field of game nutrition and a favourite among many of our members, for this award. Gamekeepers and those involved in the shooting industry carry out vast amounts of conservation work across the British countryside – improving biodiversity, creating habitats and carrying out sustainable land management. 

“We are delighted to celebrate this work through this new award, which will promote Best Practice and Biodiversity across the industry. Examples of the work the award will celebrate includes people who work across protected landscapes, those who have come up with new techniques developed for the benefit of wildlife habitats, and a special award for husbandry and welfare, in which nominations will be received from vets.” 

You can’t nominate yourself for this award, so if you’d like to share some of the excellent work you and your team then do please encourage others to nominate you. Alternatively, you can nominate the sterling work of another individual or team. Nominees can be voted for by anyone who recognised the significant contribution an individual brings to conservation, land management or biodiversity. This could include your own staff, beaters picker ups, vets, nutrition advisors and of course guns.

To find out more about the award categories and submit your nomination, visit Conservationchampions.org.Nominations will be accepted throughout the year until the closing date of 1 December 2022.