Conder Head back in October 2018 I’ve been worrying about deep peat in the Bowland Fells for weeks. Well, not all the time but off and on. I asked NE whether the area on which a reader of this blog had seen heather burning a couple of months ago (see above) was in fact blanket…
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
Waitrose – is there anyone there?
Waitrose has known for over 5 weeks (and should have known anyway) that they are offering for sale game meat with misleading health warnings over lead content. And yet they haven’t yet done anything about it. If they had come back to me and politely said ‘Go away!’ I’d have been more impressed than the…
2019 will be another bad year for driven grouse shooting.
2019 will be another bad year for driven grouse shooting. Here are some of the reasons: the long, long, long-awaited analysis of the NE Hen Harrier tagging data should be published soon. Getting these data published clearly hasn’t been as straightforward as the authors had hoped as back in mid-August they were hoping that the…
This blog resolves…
to stand up for nature not to be gratuitously nasty not to be afraid of upsetting people to write with clarity and some style to reduce the number of typos and spelling mistakes to give others a voice to offer practical advice for its readers to help nature sometimes to be first with the news,…
Red Kites in my 2018
This year, the departing 2018, I’ve kept a note of whether I see Red Kites each day. The December tally was 20 days out of 31. January: 22 days out of 31. February: 24 days out of 28. March: 26 days out of 31. April: 20 days out of 30. May: 7 days out of…
Guest blog series, A Break from Humanity (5) by Ian Carter.
Continued from yesterday It was my growing interest in wild food that, indirectly, helped me to crystallise my thoughts on my relationship with the natural world. I had been reading The Wild Life by John Lewis-Stempel in which he describes a year living on his small-holding in rural Herefordshire, feeding himself only on the wild plants…
Guest blog series, A Break from Humanity (4) by Ian Carter.
Continued from yesterday After eighteen months away from work I began to reflect on my time spent wandering around the wilder corners of mid-Devon. I was increasingly aware of a nagging sense of dissatisfaction. I’d seen plenty of interesting things, including species I’d been trying to track down for years without success, and I’d enjoyed…
2018 – another terrible year for grouse shooters
Grouse shooting is still with us but its supporters must be counting the years. The ratchet of progress is irresistible and driven grouse shooting is doomed. 2018 brought its demise a bit closer and so will 2019. I’m looking forward to 2019. 2018 was the year when: there were very few Red Grouse available for…
Tim Melling – Red-billed Blue Magpies
Tim writes: I did see plenty of ordinary Magpies in China, but they were completely upstaged by their beautiful, blue cousins. These striking birds were extraordinarily wary but with time and patience I managed to capture several photographs. Its body is about the same size as a common Magpie but the tail is much longer,…
Some of my favourite Ralph Underhill cartoons from 2018
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