Tim writes: Apart from being the sole European representative of a tropical family of butterflies, Duke of Burgundy has another unusual attribute. Males and females have a different number of legs. Everyone knows that all insects have six legs, but sometimes they are reduced to become vestigial appendages, hardly visible at all. This is exactly…
Year: 2017
Bank holiday Monday book review – Stories from the Leopold Shack by Estella Leopold.
Aldo Leopold was a wildlife philosopher and guru, and is widely seen to have been a highly influential leader of environmental thinking in the USA. This book, written by one of his daughters, is a tribute to Leopold and an account of the family times in the shack in the Wisconsin woods which features in…
Tim Melling – Lammergeier
Tim writes: Also known as the Bearded Vulture, the Lammergeier is the only animal on the planet known to feed almost exclusively on bones. It has an extremely acidic stomach (with a pH of around 1) that can dissolve bones and the high fat content marrow inside. Even the young nestlings are fed on small…
Sunday book review – Songs of Love & War by Dominic Couzens
It’s quite difficult to tell what this book is about from its title, its prologue or from its dust jacket. You might be misled into thinking that it is mostly about bird song, but it isn’t. It dips into various aspects of bird behaviour and mixes these accounts with the author’s personal observations of birds…
Shot Buzzard in Yorkshire Dales National Park – hardly news!
Police are appealing for information as another dead raptor is found in the Yorkshire Dales National Park – this time a Buzzard just about a mile from the much-visited Malham Cove Peregrine site. The bird’s body was found (no details of when are given – 16 May) by a local farmer and a post-mortem X-ray…