This is progress

Gavin Gamble’s e-petition to ban driven grouse shooting has had another good week – it passed 14,000 signatures and is now closer to 15,000.  Well done! It is not yet a third of its way through its lifetime but it’s getting close to that.   Having passed 10,000 signatures and prompted an inadequate and disappointing…

Oscar Dewhurst – Raccoon

  Oscar writes: while I was in Canada, I had a day to myself in Vancouver, so jumped on a bus and headed to Stanley Park in the hope of finding some wildlife to photograph. The Raccoons there are very confiding, presumable because they are fed by the visitors there, so I spent a couple…

Favourite nature books?

This is the early stage of a hunt for our favourite nature book – we can all nominate books up until the end of 30 November, and then it will be up to a bunch of learned judges (apparently) to decide on the shortlist of 10 for a public vote in January which is when…

Sunday book review – A History of Birds by Simon Wills

  This book is similar in some ways to that reviewed earlier this morning – this one is cheaper and better. Simon Willis chooses 30 species (eg Blue Tit, Lapwing) and groups of birds (eagles, flamingos) and tells us interesting things about them and about people connected to them. This book is beautifully illustrated with…

Sunday book review – Birdmania by Bernd Brunner

  This book is really quite annoying. It’s annoying because it has some really good parts but it lacks structure of any sort. Most sentences are perfect but many paragraphs are a collection of sentences that are poorly linked together. I often got to the end of a paragraph and went back to try to…