Friday 12 September 2014

Rare Pied Wagtail gives Tesco the bird

                                                                                                                         pic: Wild About Britain

The Telegraph reports that for the past few weeks a Pied Wagtail has been resisting all Tesco attempts at capture in their Gt Yarmouth store.

The company was even granted a licence by Natural England to bring in a sniper to kill the protected bird, prompting outrage from customers, environmentalists and a BBC wildlife presenter.

Because of the reaction, Tesco have decided to revert to more old fashioned means of trapping and releasing the ‘unwelcome’ shopper-bird into the wild….

Given their large-space redundancy and shopper attrition, a more lateral-thinking approach might be to optimise the traffic-building potential of the situation via innovative instore theatre.

In other words, why not set up a series of gentle faux-attempts to capture the bird, stretching over several weeks, shooting it photographically, and posting the ongoing results on YouTube? 

Incidentally, for those NAMs that cannot work a visit to Gt. Yarmouth into their  store-check schedule, a comprehensive BBC treatment of the Pied Wagtail is available here.

Update 23-09-2014: for bird lovers everywhere.
Apparently, the Tesco wagtail has now  been caught and released into the wild.
In other words it would appear that Tesco will not be pursuing the photo-opportunity route suggested above, and are probably preoccupied with other issues...

Hat-tip to Richard for pointing us at the article

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