Standing up for Nature
I wrote to Defra (see following blog) and my MP (see here) about the fact that Defra took over 5 months to respond to an enquiry from my MP on my behalf. I received this response: Dear Mark,Thank you for your email.I was sorry to hear that you were dissatisfied with the length of response…
This is the sequel to the excellent Calls from the Wild (reviewed here). PC Bob McKay gets to tackle more wildlife crimes such as Fox hunting and deer poaching. Grouse moors, and their shady managers, play large parts in this volume along with bothered Beavers, baited Badgers and disturbed dolphins. Alan Stewart writes very well…
An identification guide is a functional thing – it exists so that the reader (or looker) can put a name, they hope the right name, to some creature. These are not the books that one picks up to read, or re-read over the years. They are the books one takes out into the field and…
Dear Mr Pursglove, Happy New Year! Thank you for the letter, dated 20 January from Defra which you passed on to me and I received yesterday. I am grateful to you for your efforts on my behalf. However, the letter was in response to your letter on 18 August when you forwarded my letter to…
Defra Service Standards Adjudicator I wrote to my MP on 10 August last year about the failure of Defra to respond properly to a parliamentary petition. My MP, Tom Pursglove, forwarded my letter to George Eustice (then Secretary of State, Defra) on 18 August. Yesterday, 24 January, I received a reply from Defra (from Trudy…
Ian Parsons spent twenty years as a ranger before running his own wildlife tour business. He now writes books and articles on wildlife. He has contributed many articles to this blog (see here). His book A Vulture Landscape (reviewed here) was published by Whittles Publishing in 2020, this was followed by Seasonality in 2022 (reviewed…
This is a monumental book about what is regarded as the fastest animal on the planet (or flying over it). At over 500 pages, and amply and attractively illustrated, this is a tribute to and reference source about a marvellous bird. The brilliance of this bird is well captured in many of the photographs but…
Tom Bowser is the owner of Argaty and author of A Sky Full of Kites: A Rewilding Story (reviewed here). Argaty is a working farm based on the Braes of Doune in central Scotland. It has been home to the Bowser family since 1916. The farm has two aims: to produce food in an environmentally…
The risk assessment published yesterday by Defra, but presumably done by APHA, is vaguely interesting but not spectacularly well-informed. It’s not that well-informed because no-one has invested in studying the process of disease transmission of avian flu to, within, or from wild birds. So there is quite a lot of guesswork dressed up as something…
Today I will carefully be reading this, Risk Assessment on the spread of High Pathogenicity Avian Influenza (HPAI) H5N1 to wild birds from released, formerly captive gamebirds in Great Britain: Pheasants (click here), which was rather quietly released by Defra yesterday. My aim is to blog about this by the end of the day, but…