This is the story of the relationships between the author and a team of conservation volunteers. It is a tender account of those relationships and has some very, very well-written and moving passages. I liked it a lot. However, although these are conservation volunteers, nature is the backdrop to this book rather than a leading…
Author: Mark
Born Bristol, UK
Educated: Cleeve House School Bristol, Bristol Grammar School and Downing College Cambridge
Ph.D. University of Aberdeen, Winter activity of pipistrelle bats.
NERC post-doctoral Research Fellow, Edward Grey Institute, Oxford University
Former Conservation Director of the RSPB, 1989-2011
Sunday book review – Enjoying Birdwatching in Lancashire and Cumbria by David Hindle
I wrote the foreword for this book (the author must have caught me on a good day) but it was published last year so I have been rather dilatory in giving it the little breath of publicity here that it most certainly deserves. The title is self-explanatory but few vaguely similar regional books use the…
Guest blog – Walshaw Turbine 25 by John Page
John Page was born in the West Riding, a proud Yorkshireman and was taught to play cricket left-handed “’cos it flummoxes t’ bowler, and buggers up t’ field.” He went to university in London and Leeds, and enjoyed (most of the time) attempting to teach young people that there’s a big wide world beyond the…
Guest blog – Walshaw Turbine 56 by Nick MacKinnon
Nick MacKinnon is a freelance teacher of Maths, English and Medieval History, and lives above Haworth, in the last inhabited house before Top Withens = Wuthering Heights. In 1992 he founded the successful Campaign to Save Radio 4 Long Wave while in plaster following a rock-climbing accident on Skye. His poem ‘The metric system’ won…
Mid-week book review – Stoats, Weasels, Martens and Polecats by Jenny Macpherson
This is a very interesting book about a very few species and a very good New Naturalist. The New Naturalist series put out some rather unattractive books a while ago with terribly reproduced and somewhat irrelevant images. Those days have certainly passed. This is a well-produced volume with good photographs, graphs and figures. The author…