Time for tidal in the Severn Estuary?

The Hendry review is due to be published tomorrow and is expected to recommend the go-ahead for a tidal lagoon project in Swansea Bay. This has been the subject of a variety of posts on this blog: Guest blog – Time for tidal power by Sian John, 15 July 2016; NGO reaction to Swansea Bay…

Guest blog – England’s Serengeti? by Steve Jones

  Steve Jones has worked in conservation in the UK and overseas for two decades, promoting wildlife-friendly farming and designated site conservation in the UK, and large mammal conservation in the tropics. He writes on wildlife-friendly farming, land sparing and rewilding at https://naturalareasblog.wordpress.com         Making space for wild nature in England’s wheat…

Monbiot, Batters on the Vine

I very rarely listen to Radio2 – I am so firmly a Radio4 stick-in-the-mud – so I am grateful to a reader of this blog for pointing me in the direction of the Jeremy Vine show this lunch time (although I feel rather bad about temporarily deserting Martha Kearney) where there was what passes for…

Bird flu – another update

It didn’t take a lot ornithological nous to realise that nine Mute Swans with H5N8 bird flu virus in Dorset were quite likely to have come from Abbotsbury Swannery – as surmised in this blog on Saturday and trumpetted by the national press yesterday (Guardian, Telegraph, BBC). Defra doesn’t test additional birds from a location…

Nature schooling

When Keith Betton interviewed the late, great Phil Hollom in Behind the Binoculars, Hollom said that when he was at school at Cockfosters in the 1920s he had looked out of the window during a school exam and seen a Red-backed Shrike.  This would have been regarded as a mere distraction, though a pleasant one,…