‘When a ‘sport’ becomes a crime wave’ This’ll be an interesting one for the Moorland Association to field. Will it be Amanda ‘If we let the hen harrier in, we will soon have nothing else‘ Anderson, or the new chair of the Moorland Association, that’s Mark William Philip Cunliffe-Lister, Lord Masham, the future Earl of…
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
Proposal to set statutory Maximum Levels for lead in game meat.
In an open-access paper published this week, four biologists, one of whom is also a hunter, propose that as well as banning the use of lead ammunition for shooting game there should also be a legal Maximum Level (ML) set for lead in game meat. This seems entirely sensible since there is a ML for…
Press release – The Beaver Trust
Legal killing of 1-in-5 Scottish beavers spotlights need for fresh approach across Britain The killing of 87 beavers in Scotland – one fifth of the country’s population – proves there is an urgent need for humans to live more sympathetically alongside beavers across Britain, the Beaver Trust said today. The Trust said lethal control of…
Guest blog – Natural History GCSE (4) by Mary Colwell
Mary Colwell is an award-winning radio, TV and internet producer winning 14 awards over the last 10 years, including a Sony Gold in 2009. She is also a radio presenter and feature writer for The Tablet. Mary has written five previous guest blogs here (A Natural History GCSE, 23 November 2012; Shared Planet, 15 January 2015;…
Is it wild hacking time in Scotland – an SNH response
SNH are pretty helpful when it comes to answering questions of a media variety. Yesterday I asked them whether they had issued any licences for wild hacking in Scotland this year which they could have answered with a ‘yes’ or a ‘no’. I also said that I’d be interested in where they were with any…
Guest blog – Wild Ken Hill by Dominic Buscall
I am drawn to difficult problems. I spent the first five years of my career helping companies solve their most complex business problems with L.E.K. Consulting, and in the last few years I have become particularly interested in the UK’s land use conundrum. What do we want from our land, and how do we get…
A trivial matter
When you have a blog and website, and I guess it might depend on whether your site is seen to be ‘successful’ or not, you get a lot of unsolicited emails about advertising and completely irrelevant guest posts. I reply to most of these with a polite ‘no thanks’, but I do reply. I had…
Lockdown and Birdtrack again
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The Birdtrack reporting rate graphs for Britain and Ireland for two species show a pretty convincing impact of lockdown on avian reporting rates – as suggested in an earlier blog post here. Here is the graph for House Sparrow for this year and the historical data: So this shows that for the early part of…
Cuckoo
I was bathing in bird song again this morning – from about 410am. A Cuckoo sang from 415am – 445am. Probably because it is a low-pitched song it was quite difficult to locate its direction. The sound to which I listened was clearly bouncing off the wall of my own house because that was very…
Is it wild hacking time in Scotland?
You might remember a series of blogs I’ve written about wild hacking of Gyr Falcons in two parts of Scotland. Last year SNH licensed the temporary release of 100 Gyr Falcons in Ayrshire and 150 in Moray in the period 1 June to September and with no more than 40 at a time in each…