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
Walk out
I haven’t written much about the Raptor Persecution Priority Delivery Group because it has largely been a waste of space for years. There have been strong signs from the new Chair, Supt Nick Lyall, that he wanted the group to be more effective in tackling wildlife crime. On Wednesday the group had its first meeting…
EDM #1963 gains more supporters
This EDM has acquired 13 signatures now. See Caroline Lucas’s Guest Blog on this site earlier this week – click here. Write to your MP asking them to add their name – like I did here. Here are the 13 MPs who have added their names, including the first Tory – unsurprisingly that is Zac…
News from the NGOs
RSPB: RSPB is going through a big reorganisation and cost-cutting exercise. Something like 300 staff will be going (from c2000 altogether). The English regions will shrink from five to three with the North England Region being largely untouched (as far as boundaries are concerned) except for losing Derbyshire to the new Mid-England Region). East Anglia…
Icelandic whaling
A Minke Whale steak. This report in Icelandreview, of a report on the economics of whaling in Iceland (see account in Icelandic here), suggests that the hunting of whales for their meat is of net economic benefit to the Icelandic economy and that it is not putting off whale-watching tourists. The latter suggestion is difficult…
from Mr Carbo
Comments Off on from Mr Carbo
See Ian Parsons’s interesting guest blog on whether we should call gamebirds, gamebirds.
Deep peat burning
Conder Head back in October 2018 This fire on the Abbeystead Estate’s Conder Head back in October has interested me. Is it on blanket bog? Apparently not. Is it on deep peat? Apparently so – see below a reply I received today. Well, we got there in the end. Natural England/Defra appear to be happy…
More Pheasants dumped – The Times
Yesterday’s The Times has a full page on Pheasants being dumped after shooting, and a leader, the second leader, entitled Pheasants’ Revolt too. See video here. The leader is a curate’s egg of a piece with the sensible sentence ‘Shooting has to be independently regulated and shot birds should be processed as far as possible…
Waitrose – still rather pathetic!
It seems that Waitrose is moving very, very slowly to change its misleading health warning on the game meat that it has been selling for weeks and weeks in its stores. I say ‘it seems’ because I received this response on Wednesday … Dear Dr Avery Thanks for your patience while I looked into this…
Guest blog – Reclaiming the name by Ian Parsons
Reclaiming the Name One of my favourite places in Britain is the north of Dartmoor, it has a wild and rugged appeal and, more often than not, a lack of people, although this might have something to do with the artillery ranges… Something happened up there recently, as I walked along the ridges overlooking the…