Sunday book review – INN Search of Birds by John Lawton

This is a fun book by a birder and one of the UK’s most eminent population ecologists. Prof Sir John Lawton CBE FRS has won numerous awards for his science and was the chair of a group which produced an important report known, as the Lawton report, Making Space for Nature, which recommended that England…

Sunday book review – Island to Island by Sally Mills

This is a follow up to the same author’s Island to Island (reviewed here) but with the subtitle ‘A collection of photographs – the pictures behind the story‘.  And it is  a book of photographs with some words joining them together from the island of Aride in the Seychelles where the author was a warden…

The Defra board – hardly a model of independent scrutiny

Following yesterday’s blog about the appointment of Heather Hancock, grouse moor owner, as lead non-exec on the Defra Board a few more points. the transparency data on the Defra website are out of date despite being updated on 27 July 2023 – yes, yesterday! They have information about former non-exec directors but nothing about Heather…

New Defra non-exec director is a grouse moor owner

You couldn’t make it up, but then, you don’t have to. The latest non-exec appointment to the Defra Board, made by the Secretary of State Therese Coffey herself, is a grouse moor owner from the Yorkshire Dales on whose grouse moor two Hen Harriers are reported to have disappeared. Although Defra somehow manage not to…

Sunday book review: The Atlas of Early Modern Wildlife by Lee Raye.

I’ve been looking forward to this book for ages. It arrived yesterday and thanks to a rainy day I was able to spend much of yesterday (and some of today) getting to grips with it. It was worth the wait. I tend to think of the early modern era as involving The Beatles but here…