This blog: Feral reviews, comments, guest blogs, readers, photos

Writing competition:  I wasn’t inundated with reviews of Feral for this blog’s latest writing competition (something of a relief) but there were plenty and four have been short-listed by me and are now being read by the distinguished panel of judges.  Watch this space.

 

A few words on comments:

You are welcome to comment on the posts on this blog. Please try to keep more or less to the topic of the blog.  Most of you do, most of the time.

If you have never commented here, please consider doing so. A bit more variety would be appreciated by me, and, I’m fairly sure, by other readers. However, I really appreciate the comments that do appear here from a variety of sources, views and personalities.

Every comment that appears here is moderated by me to check that it is legal, not libellous, not in poor taste etc.  That is quite a task.  It’s quite easy if I am sitting at a computer but it takes quite a while longer if I am out and about and am receiving your comments on my phone.

There are some people who comment here whose comments are briefly scanned and rapidly approved – I won’t name names but they are regular contributors who I trust.

If your comment takes a ‘long’ time to appear it might be because of one of several reasons (or a combination): I haven’t noticed it; I have noticed it but I am doing 60mph up (or down) the A1 and I can’t deal with it; I am in the middle of writing a post and can’t moderate your comment without losing my flow; it has links in it that I need to check and I can’t be bothered to do that on my phone because it takes ages; you have already posted several comments on the same blog on the same day (sometimes in the same hour) and I just think you should let someone else have a say and get your thoughts straight before you start(!); your comment is straying off subject; your comment is a rather blatant plug for another blog; you say something to which I am keen to reply and I don’t have the time to reply straight away so you’ll have to wait.

For interest, the spam filter has weeded out very nearly 2,000,000 spam comments which I am glad I haven’t had to read (isn’t the world a strange place?).  Nearly 49,000 comments have been moderated.  There have been a few, maybe a couple of dozen, comments which I have edited – and indicated how and why they were edited.  From memory, there are still only about a dozen comments which I have not posted here.  A few of these have looked suspicious to me and when I emailed the alleged sender I found that the email address was invalid – I don’t check every comment for a valid email address but I am pretty good at spotting dodgy-looking ones.  Freddie Flintstone – please try harder.

Thanks for your comments. Please keep them coming.

 

Guest blogs: I welcome them. Please look at the guidance here.

 

Number of readers – unique users:

2012, 51k

2013, 72k

2014, 135k

2015, estimated 162k (counter went on the blink for c2 months)

2016, 231k

2017, heading for c160k at a guess.

 

Photos:

If you have some decent images (.jpg) of wildlife (not restricted to birds, or even to animals – in fact some plants would be good) and can string some interesting words together to accompany the photographs then please do send them to me for use on weekends.  Oscar Dewhurst and Tim Melling are great supporters of this blog but I am very keen to have more contributors – from around the world. Recent examples include Guy Shorrock and Vishal Jadhav.  Maybe I shouldn’t say this, but for me the words are as important as the image – I’m looking for a striking image with an interesting story about how the photograph came about or something about the species itself.

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