Standing up for Nature
Day 2 – this looks like another excellent day. My plan: 1000-1045 Mark Carwardine EVENTS MARQUEE Was it really the last chance to see? 1100-1145 Chris Packham plus EVENTS MARQUEE Tales from the frontline of conservation 1500-1545 Stephen Moss chair EVENTS MARQUEE Bird Brain of Britain – as a previous winner (!) I…
Day 1 of the Bird Fair just flew past – and much of it went more or less to plan. Gave away my spare 3-day ticket (with the plea that the recipient spent some money on the BAWC stand) TICK! Queued in the car but not at the gate – excellent! TICK!! Found Ruth Miller…
Here we go – Day 1 Weather forecast – could get a bit blowy and maybe wet towards very end of day (glad I’m not camping – and best of luck to those who are). Plan for the day – although it will not necessarily happen… 0900 or soon after. Stand in queue even…
I have spent quite a lot of time, some of it in pubs, talking about what would be the legal repercussions of walking through a grouse shoot which is in process. It seems that there aren’t any – at least that’s what I understand from this response from Natural England’s Open Access Contact Centre; …
You may remember that last year the likes of Ian Botham and the not-so-talented Viscount Ridley were using an unpublished ‘survey’ to prop up their view that grouse shooting is great for wildlife. At the time, Matt Ridley refused to disclose the data on which he based his claim with ‘It was a privately commissioned…
You may remember this video released by the RSPB last week … …and the RSPB blog on the case. Denton Moor is in the Nidderdale AONB and the relevant part of the moor is owned by the prestigious engineering firm NG Bailey. They commented to me as follows; RSPB/Marsh harrier incident on Denton Moor…
The long story of protecting the West Pennine Moors as an SSSI has come to its administrative climax with the publication of the legal documents following an NE Board meeting in July. Because new SSSIs aren’t that common, and new upland ones certainly aren’t, I actually glanced through the document with some interest, when my…
Chris Packham is a great guy – I admire his toughness and his persistence. But he gets an awful lot of very nasty flak from the shooters. Remember the Countryside Alliance called for the BBC to drop their best wildlife presenter a couple of years ago – well, don’t think that has gone away,…
The authors’ forum at the Bird Fair is packed with good talks by authors of good books on each of the three days. Here are examples of talks by authors of books that have been reviewed here: Friday 1315-1400, Ian Newton, Farming and Birds Saturday 1415-1500,…
Reviewed by Ian Carter This is clearly a book that has stood the test of time, deemed worthy of a new edition almost ten years on from its initial publication. After a few pages of introduction, the bulk of the book is taken up by the species accounts, roughly equally split into vertebrates, invertebrates…