Standing up for Nature
The investigation of brood meddling of Hen Harriers which Natural England has licensed has resulted in 14 chicks being taken into captivity and 13 of them being released into the wild again. That sounds quite good, but how would we assess how good it is? Obviously, we can’t simply compare the number of captive-reared chicks…
The results are in for BSBI’s tenth New Year Plant Hunt, when plant-lovers cross Britain and Ireland head out to see what is flowering in their local patch. 1,811 people took part this year – more than ever before – but restrictions around Covid-19 had surprising impacts on the wild flowers they spotted in bloom….
On Wednesday and Thursday this week, three Court of Appeal judges will hear appeals from myself and the RSPB on the subject of Natural England’s controversial licensing of brood meddling of Hen Harriers. The three judges will be considering the legal point of whether Justice Lang was right to dismiss our judicial reviews on this…
Guy writes: as a young boy interested in birds, albatrosses, being birds mainly of the southern hemisphere, always had something of a mystical status to me. From school, I remember an English Literature lesson covering the ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ by Samuel Coleridge. This lengthy poem revolves around the killing of an albatross…
Tim writes: some books and websites call this species Lesser Redpoll (Acanthis cabaret) but there is no genetic difference between these and Common Redpolls (A. flammae). And from 1 January 2018 BOU officially dropped this species to become a subspecies of Common Redpoll when they adopted the IOC species guidelines. So this is now Common…
There was one in our garden today. It was a sunny day but not by any means a warm one.
This Guardian headline is a bit misleading as the text of the Oceana report shows that the assessment covered 104 stocks, and for getting on for half of them there were too few data to be confident on stock state one way or the other. 20% of stocks were in critical condition and 36% were…
My yesterday was divided between an excellent meeting with World Land Trust trustees and quite a lot of activity with my legal team ahead of next week’s Court of Appeal brood-meddling hearing. On the former, despite the impacts of covid, 2020 was a successful year as far as fund-raising was concerned, but also more importantly,…