Southern Scotland’s biggest community land buyout launches crowdfunding campaign to create vast new nature reserve An initiative to create a vast new nature reserve in Dumfries and Galloway through southern Scotland’s largest community land buyout is being launched today, with a £3 million crowdfunding campaign to help purchase 10,500 acres of Langholm Moor. The ambitious…
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
News: Natural England and the Peregrine chicks – not quite true…
You’ll probably remember the furore over Natural England licensing the taking of 6 Peregrine chicks from the wild in England. Well, when I say remember, it has hardly died down. See my original blog, Gary Wall’s guest blog, a further blog by me and a guest blog by OneKind’s Bob Elliot. We all thought, probably…
Roseate Terns on Coquet Island – RSPB press release
Chance of a rosy future with record year for roseate terns 2019 saw a record-breaking 122 pairs of roseate terns, Europe’s rarest breeding seabird, on Coquet Island. Three webcams now installed on Coquet Island provide a window into the life of roseate terns and puffins. In 2019 there was a record-breaking 122 breeding pairs of…
Planning for an online Hen Harrier Day
An online Hen Harrier Day for 2020 In January I told you about plans for Hen Harrier Day in 2020. These were going along swimmingly until Covid-19 came along. There were plans for Hen Harrier Days in all the countries of the UK, ten events in all with more in the pipeline. There were some…
Press release – Trees for Life
Volunteers isolate at Highlands ‘lost world’ to save thousands of young trees A team of six people from Trees for Life have been voluntarily isolating themselves at the charity’s flagship Dundreggan rewilding estate in Glenmoriston, near Loch Ness in the Highlands since 23 March – to save more than 100,000 native young trees from being…
Marian Spain confirmed as Natural England CEO
Marian Spain has been appointed as the ‘new’ chief executive of Natural England, taking the post on a permanent basis after serving as interim chief executive since December 2018. Environment Secretary George Eustice said: I want to thank Marian for all her excellent work over the last year. As we focus on setting environmental policy…
If Starlings had…
If Starlings had contrails, like planes, then the sky above my garden would be painted with the paths of Starlings taking food to their recently hatched young. Starlings are single-prey loaders when their chicks are young (they fly out from the nest to collect one item of food and fly back to the nest with…
Bird song (45) – Nightjar
I think of Nightjars as being birds of southern England but they are actually quite widely found in the UK including parts of Wales, northern England and southern Scotland. But I first heard them on the Somerset Levels in my youth and my strongest memories of them are on heathlands in Dorset, Hampshire, Norfolk and…
Brood meddling doomed for 2020?
Natural England is expected soon to bow to the almost inevitable and drop any plans for brood meddling of Hen Harriers in 2020. All Natural England fieldwork is suspended at the moment in line with government instructions on non-essential travel. Natural England is re-allocating staff resources to priority areas in an attempt to ensure that…
Lockdown Nature-writing challenge
Comments Off on Lockdown Nature-writing challenge
At the time of writing there have been 91 votes cast for your favourite of the dozen entries (probably more by now) in this challenge to write about nature and lockdown. One entry has 20 of the 91 votes and one has a single vote: and the rest are strung out pretty evenly across the…