Sarah Whitebread is an environmental campaigner and Lib Dem councillor from Cambridge. She has an Mphil in Environmental Policy and works for an MP in Westminster. Cambridgeshire is currently being run by a climate sceptic. Councillor Nick Clarke, leader of the County Council, declared on his blog a few months ago that “it is now clear…
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
Pheasants in the balance
State of the UK’s Birds 2012 is full of interesting information. I was struck by the analysis of the number and weight of birds in the UK as a whole. In the early 1970s there were about 105 million pairs of birds in the UK – now there are around 83 million. More than a…
Book review – Britain’s Sea Mammals by Jon Dunn, Robert Still and Hugh Harrop
The first cetacean I ever saw was probably a harbour porpoise off the coast of Argyll – although I thought it was a dolphin. And the first whale I saw, which surfaced in a raft of Manx shearwaters off the north coast of Rhum, was probably a minke whale – although I thought it was…
Some bits and pieces
Give as you live. This is a good idea: if you sign up to this scheme, and do a bit of easy ‘mouse clicking’ when you spend money on the internet then your chosen charity (mine is…. wait for it…..the RSPB) gets some money from the people to whom you are giving your money. So…
Struan Stevenson, do your maximum to yield sustainable fisheries
Tomorrow there is an important vote on the future of the Common Fisheries Policy. It seems likely that a UK (Scottish) MEP may hold the balance of power over whether overfishing continues or begins to diminish. That MEP is Struan Stevenson. When I wrote to Richard Benyon on this subject in the early part of…