I set off for the USA on Thursday.
I will miss: bluebells, orchids, black hairstreaks, Duke of Burgundy butterflies (again), spotted flycatchers, May blossom, cricket, decent beer, the Today programme, Desert Island Discs, the NGO State of Nature launch and the Derby.
I will not miss: Defra, George Osborne, cutting the grass, rain stopping play or UKIP.
What else should I be sorry to be missing and glad to be missing? And what do you think I should look forward to seeing in late june when I return?
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You will miss the freezing cold May. Migrants strugerling to feed themselves due to the lack of insects. No hen harriers breeding in England. But you will not miss the rain in June!!
Re-Tern to Terns ! I’m aiming to go Shearwater watching off Pembrokeshire & hopefully visit a Tern colony in Norfolk.
And I do hope you get the Road Runner. Beep! Beep!
Mark, you will miss the main arrival of Swifts, which seem to be running about a week late this year, but they will be around in peak numbers in June when you return. Anyway, I hope you will enjoy Chimney Swifts, Vaux Swifts, White-throated Swifts and Black Swifts.
Dick
Mark. you should look forward to July. Also to keeping your blog up to date with the folly of the ignorant.
Perhaps you’ll not miss poor cutomer service, grumpy people who don’t wish to talk to anyone (only applicable if you live in LONDON), blogging about what little is left of UK nature(plc) instead blogging how our Americna cousins are getting things right on more occasions the wrong in regards to protecting nature.
Enjoy your trip but don’t go to any rural crossroads late at night
Not going to US as not retired yet however when I do :-
Will not miss:-
Labour Party,
Being preached at by NGO’s
Global warming,
and Countryfile
Will miss:-
Good sense of humour.
Come on Julian, the Labour Party DID buy us Thorne Moors and Hatfield Moors, a lot moor than the present lot have done.
Julian – ha ha! I’m looking forward to retirement too.
Ha ! I can’t imagine either me or you ever retiring; can you imagine the endless boredom of it, even a bank holiday weekend drives me to distraction.
And Dis.. (isn’t that a shrub ?) did they ? Good for them. (must have bought it on Visa and left us the bill !)
Would you rather this present lot have a free hand to destroy everything. Perhaps you should read Catherine Caufields Thorne Moors.
I will ! (but are you a bush ?)
William Bunting: Thorne Moors Greatest Defender!
In the early 1950s, an irascible, uncompromising man called William Bunting arrived in Thorne. Born in Barnsley in 1916 he had acted as a courier and smuggler for the anarchists in the Spanish Civil War. Fascinated by the moors, Bunting became a self-taught naturalist. His discoveries include a species of alga that lives on the antenna of microscopic water fleas, and as well as this he was the first person to draw attention to the Bronze Age wooden pathway under Thorne Moors.
Angered by the publication in 1952 of West Riding County Council’s footpath map, showing no paths at all on Thorne, Bunting taught himself to read Latin, Medieval English and Norman French so to acquaint himself with the confused and arcane laws and administrative regulations on public rights-of-way. With this knowledge he fought the illegal enclosure of Thorne through the courts for the next two decades. He also continued to walk the old footpaths, removing obstacles and confronting angry landowners as he went. When walking on the moors he carried a gun, a walking stick concealing a razor-sharp sabre, a machete and his wire cutters. When asked if he had ever had occasion to fire a gun while on the moors, he roared, “What do you think I use them for, picking my bloody nose?”
In the early 1960s, conventional wisdom was that farming and peat digging had already ruined Thorne Moors and it was generally regarded as a piece of wasteland. The Yorkshire Naturalists’ Trust voted not to object to a plan to dump fuel ash on the moors. Bunting, outraged, wrote scathing letters, compiled reports and badgered the organisation’s leading lights to come and see for themselves. They reversed their decision. Bunting defeated numerous plans for similar schemes. As well as the planners and developers, Bunting also had to fight the Nature Conservancy Council (NCC – a precursor of English Nature) which had denied for many years that there was anything of interest on Thorne Moors.
In late 1971, Fisons excavated several deep drains that threatened to destroy completely the richest part of the area. With the heart of the moors at risk, Bunting and a group of naturalists, local residents and students from a number of northern universities took matters into their own hands. Calling themselves Bunting’s Beavers, the group went onto the Moors practically every weekend throughout the spring and summer of 1972 to dam the drains. Fisons’ workers were unable to keep up with them and by the early autumn dozens of dams had been built, some of them more than forty feet thick.
In October 1972, shortly after a BBC TV crew filmed the Beavers at work, Fisons dynamited 18 of the dams. The Beavers repaired the dams, and Fisons, which had been showered with unfavourable publicity, let the new dams stand. Fisons eventually entered into an agreement to protect that area from drainage and cutting, and to reinforce several of the Beavers’ dams and eleven years later, the NCC bought 180 acres of it and declared it a National Nature Reserve.
William Bunting died in 1995, having been pensioned out of the army in the late 1940s with TB and diagnosed shortly afterward with a crippling inflammation of the vertebrae. He was ill and in terrible pain for much of his life, yet without his obsessive and aggressive protection, Thorne Moors would have been destroyed long ago.
We take his words to heart: “I suggest that the essence of conservation lies with one simple word, NO! Don’t become like those prostitutes in the Nature Conservancy. Say no, mean no, fight to retain the places we have.”
Source: Thorne Moors by Catherine Caufield (Sumach Press, 1991
Julian – thanks v much for posting that comment.
The mass produced American beers are certainly pretty awful but decent, independently produced, beers can be found without too much trouble. Enjoy!
No problem, rather a touching story really whatever your persuasion. Still not the foggiest idea what it’s got to do with anything relevant to today’s light hearted banter !
Julian, I suggest you read the book if you haven,t. What it has to do with todays banter is CONSERVATION, a forgotten word. WB was a fore-runner of the conservation movement, before it became popular. If you google my user name you will get the picture, all the best.
Enjoy !
Best wishes
Julian, if you don’t want to be preached to then quite simply do the job we as tax payers pay you to do? Protection, conservation, science to underpin management work on public land, who yes we paid for through Govt. credit card!
Remember also in 1997 the self proclaimed guardians of the countryside (note that strapline has been ditched alongside compliance to Habitats Directive, Aarhus etc.) decided the country’s two largest lowland raised mires in the UK were no longer worthy of SSSI status (now remind me, who funded the hydrological reports on which English Nature based their decision & Idle retired shortly after).
So, thanks Mr Meacher but more importantly thank you to all the NGOs and the grassroots community activists who didn’t take any notice of those who seem to think they know best (statutory advisers aka lapdogs, ex-‘Muzzled Watchdogs’)!
Mark need to add one more item to my list of things I won’t miss if I could please ? People who take things too seriously on a Sunday ? Thanks
Julian, wildlife conservation does not take Sundays off. If you think Conservation is flippant perhaps you have missed the point?
“wildlife conservation does not take Sundays off”
Unlike the majority of Blogheads who disappear at the weekend* then return on weekdays when they are supposed to be working no wonder we need all those immigrants to do all the work that isn’t being done because of that interweb and another thing …
* a sweeping generalisation, of course
I doubt that I missed anything !