Great British Game Week ended yesterday. I’m sure it was a great success but on Twitter the top posts were all to do with raptor persecution – there’s an example below. Well done! To @raptorpersscot, @_robsheldon , @ban_dgs and others for using this social media opportunity to ram home the message that driven grouse…
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
This is progress
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Gavin Gamble’s e-petition to ban driven grouse shooting has had another good week – it passed 14,000 signatures and is now closer to 15,000. Well done! It is not yet a third of its way through its lifetime but it’s getting close to that. Having passed 10,000 signatures and prompted an inadequate and disappointing…
Oscar Dewhurst – Raccoon
Oscar writes: while I was in Canada, I had a day to myself in Vancouver, so jumped on a bus and headed to Stanley Park in the hope of finding some wildlife to photograph. The Raccoons there are very confiding, presumable because they are fed by the visitors there, so I spent a couple…
Sunday book review – A History of Birds by Simon Wills
This book is similar in some ways to that reviewed earlier this morning – this one is cheaper and better. Simon Willis chooses 30 species (eg Blue Tit, Lapwing) and groups of birds (eagles, flamingos) and tells us interesting things about them and about people connected to them. This book is beautifully illustrated with…
Sunday book review – Birdmania by Bernd Brunner
This book is really quite annoying. It’s annoying because it has some really good parts but it lacks structure of any sort. Most sentences are perfect but many paragraphs are a collection of sentences that are poorly linked together. I often got to the end of a paragraph and went back to try to…
Tim Melling – Harlequins
Tim writes: I think Harlequins are one of the most beautiful ducks in the world. They breed in Iceland, Greenland, northern North America and eastern Asia. These two were floating in the surf off the Vancouver Island coast. I have always found them to be quite unapproachable, which might explain their scientific name (Histrionicus histrionicus),…
An Unreliable History of Birdwatching (35) by Paul Thomas
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Saturday cartoon by Ralph Undrhill
This cartoon has been used at around the time of Black Friday before – we approve of recycling.
Bird Photographer of the Year
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I’m looking forward to being a judge of this competition for another year – it was fun last year. If you are a photographer with some great images that would fit into the categories of this competition then have a look through your images and consider entering. Yes, the standard is high but you…
Scottish government grouse moor enquiry
Scottish government press release: New group to focus on sustainability of driven-grouse moors. Membership of an independent group to ensure grouse moor management practices are sustainable and legally compliant has been confirmed. The new group will be led by Professor Alan Werrity, who previously chaired a Scottish Natural Heritage review into sustainable moorland management. It…