Sunday bits and pieces

I think I delivered some quite thoughtful blogs to you this week, even if I say it myself (which I just have), and all of them attracted great comments from you readers – for which many thanks.  I get a lot from your comments and I am certain that it is the mixture of blog and subsequent comments that is attracting a larger and larger audience here.

Monday was butterflies – see lots of good comments but perhaps especially that of Butterfly Conservation’s Martin Warren near the end of the comment chain.

Tuesday was wood burning – where your comments helped me

Wednesday was backing out of stewardship agreements – where Roderick Leslie’s suggestion is still playing in my head

Thursday was egg collecting and Chancelloring – where making the punishment fit the crime was an interesting one to chew over

and Friday was the slow Paice of badger baiting where comments from farmers and about domestic pets were just some of the interesting ones..

 

I notice that I have another article in The Field – the January issue which seems a bit premature considering we weren’t half-way through December when I read it.  My article is (fantastic and a must-read!) about naturalists and sportsmen and discusses those field sports of pheasant shooting, twitching, fishing, fox hunting, bird ringing, egg collecting and wildfowling.

Also in The Field is a letter from a Charles Grisedale (this one?) who praises my earlier hen harrier article with faint damns and says I got the Langholm facts right (and proceeds to get them wrong himself) and with one of those rhetorical flourishes spins out a question about hen harriers at the RSPB’s nature reserve at Lake Vyrnwy (where he is also slightly misinformed according to my RSPB former colleagues).  In asking for some information to see what Mr Grisedale was on about I was pleased to learn that last year there were four hen harrier nests on the RSPB nature reserve and another two nearby, and that their nesting success wasn’t bad a tall. Not a grouse shoot very close though is there?

The National Trust has launched the Octavia Hill awards to commemorate the centenary of the death of one of their founders.  You have until 16 January to nominate someone for one of the 6 categories.

This week I got a letter from Peter Kendall in reply to my Open Letter to him which appeared in late November.  I am grateful to Peter, who I do quite like on a personal level despite all the rumours to the contrary, for his letter which was  a bit short on vision although he did say that his vision for the countryside is one that is ‘both more productive and richer in wildlife’.  Peter says that he has ‘At no time ever stated or implied that greater productivity should be achieved at the expense of biodiversity’ so we must all have misunderstood his statement here where in the first sentence of the report of his speech on his own NFU website he says ‘Government should switch its focus from bio-diversity and concentrate on farm productivity’.  Blatant Peter, blatant.  Or has your own website misreported you?

Peter also claims in his letter that agricultural productivity is ‘static’ and biodiversity is ‘improving’. Well Peter, thanks for the invitation to your farm, I will certainly take you up on that with pleasure, but the gulf between us in understanding is huge.

I was in London on Thursday and I tend to walk everywhere now because I have more time, it does me good and it’s cheaper. And on my rather wiggly way between Pall Mall and King’s Cross I was walking along the side of Bloomsbury Square and saw a sizeable flock of birds at roof-top height flying in and out of the plane trees.  I wondered for a moment if I had come across the largest flock of house sparrows I had seen in central London for years, but they turned out to be goldfinches.   Walking is also conducive to thinking and I had a good idea soon afterwards which solved a writing problem with which I had been wrestling.

Yesterday’s Guardian had a letter opposing the badger cull pilot.

Sign of the times.  I was looking at the Natural England website for some information (which I found) and thought I’d glance at the vacancies page.  There are no jobs available,  just the possibility of volunteering.  I know quite a few young people who would like to work for NE or similar organisations and they must get very dispirited if they keep drawing blanks like this.  And remember that NE is not static, it has lost hundreds of jobs this year.

I now see a red kite over my house just about every day if I spend enough time looking out the window.  I cannot glance at a red kite with equanimity – it always makes me ahppy.

This blog won’t be taking Christmas off but I am thinking now of some blogs that I can write in advance so that I can have a real break – you’ll all be too busy eating , drinking and arguing with relatives to want to read my scribblings anyway.

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