This book, out of 52 I reviewed in 2024, was my choice of wildlife book of the year – I recommend it highly. You can buy this book from Bookshop.org and I have set up a booklist to make that easy through this link https://uk.bookshop.org/shop/MarkAvery Disclosure: I am an affiliate of Bookshop.org and I will…
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
Sunday book review – England’s Green by David Matless
An interesting read – perhaps more so for those of us who have lived through the whole of this period than youngsters – but maybe not. I got on much better with this book from the moment I decided not to take it too seriously but just enjoy the ride. There is something a bit…
Sunday book review – Birds of Louth by John Clarkson and Phil Espin
This is the second edition of the 2007 title. The poignant thing about this book is that the senior author, John Clarkson, passed away in 2023 and this edition thus stands as memorial to him as well as a fine book about one part of one English county. I used to think that Lincolnshire was…
Guest blog – Walshaw Turbine 9 by John Page
John Page was born in the West Riding, a proud Yorkshireman and was taught to play cricket left-handed “’cos it flummoxes t’ bowler, and buggers up t’ field”. He went to university in London and Leeds, and enjoyed (most of the time) attempting to teach young people that there’s a big wide world beyond the…
Guest blog – Killing the Bird that Lays the Golden Egg by Gill Lewis
Killing the Bird that Lays the Golden Egg Gill Lewis is a multi-award-winning children’s author and former vet. She writes stories about animals and our human relationship with the wild world. Her books have won the US Green Earth Book Award, the German Prize for Environmental Youth Literature, and she has been awarded the Little…
Sunday book review – Nature’s Ghosts by Sophie Yeo
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This is a thoughtful and stimulating read. I enjoyed it very much. The book is about how the world used to be, ecologically. We travel back in time through the author’s narrative to a few decades ago, or a few centuries or many tens of millions of years. And we travel in space, around the…
Guest blog – Walshaw Turbine 44 by Nick MacKinnon
Nick MacKinnon is a freelance teacher of Maths, English and Medieval History, and lives above Haworth, in the last inhabited house before Top Withens = Wuthering Heights. In 1992 he founded the successful Campaign to Save Radio 4 Long Wave while in plaster following a rock-climbing accident on Skye. His poem ‘The metric system’ won…
Guest blog – Walshaw Turbine 40 by Nick MacKinnon and others
Nick MacKinnon is a freelance teacher of Maths, English and Medieval History, and lives above Haworth, in the last inhabited house before Top Withens = Wuthering Heights. In 1992 he founded the successful Campaign to Save Radio 4 Long Wave while in plaster following a rock-climbing accident on Skye. His poem ‘The metric system’ won…
Dear Mr Reed, 5 – who you should hear
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Dear Mr Reed, I’m sure you have heard lots of views and advice since you were appointed shadow secretary of state about a year ago. They can’t all be right! How do you decide who is talking nonsense? I remember a meeting with Ed Miliband when I was one of a group of NGO people…
Dear Mr Reed, 4 – your five priorities
Dear Mr Reed, welcome to your new job. It all gets real now. Yesterday you set out your five priorities for Defra; clean rivers zero waste economy food security nature recovery reducing flood risk These are good as headlines and demonstrate more strategic thought than we have seen from the Tories in 14 years. Everybody…