On Monday I did an interview for the BBC Farming Today programme, with the NFU’s Guy Smith. If you want to listen to that interview you can but you won’t learn anything new from it as the NFU is still in denial over the loss of farmland wildlife and the role that farming has played…
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
Pot pourri
It seems to have been raining for two weeks – please stop. I want to see some butterflies and more spring migrants. The summer of 1976 was a hot dry summer – and my gap year before university. When a Drought Minister was appointed the heavens opened and my first month at Cambridge seemed to…
St Mark’s Day – 25 April
I’m no saint but it is St Mark’s Day. Keep an eye open for St Mark’s Flies – with their black hairy bodies and dangling legs – not like me at all. Although before we mucked about with the calendar this would have been around 4 May rather than now – but with global warming…
Guest blog – It isn’t easy being a wildlife-friendly farmer by David Fursdon
David Fursdon is a farmer and landowner in Devon. He chairs the newly formed SW Rural and Farming Network and the established SW Chamber of Rural Enterprise. He is a Commissioner of both English Heritage and the Crown Estate and a former President of the CLA. Experiencing wildlife is one of the privileges of living…
St George, Shakespeare and little owls
Today is St George’s Day and apparently Shakespeare’s birthday and the day he died too (how tidy!). It is also the day when little owls, an introduced species, were first proved to breed in the UK – and that was in the county of Northants and just down the road from where I am writing. …