This is from SOVON in The Netherlands https://www.sovon.nl/actueel/nieuwsberichten/opnieuw-veel-wilde-vogels-getroffen-door-vogelgriep: ‘The current outbreak of the highly pathogenic H5N1 virus, which has been causing increased bird mortality in the Netherlands since November, is spreading rapidly. Barnacle geese in the north of the Netherlands are particularly hard hit, but the virus has also been detected in other species and…
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
Big Garden Birdwatch
I did it – did you? I saw some birds: House Sparrow (5), Long-tailed Tit (4), Blackbird (3), Blue Tit (3), Dunnock (2), Coal Tit (2), Great Tit (2), Collared Dove (1), Robin (1) and Goldfinch (1). Several species I expected were missing: Starling, Jackdaw, Woodpigeon… I have entered the data – have you?
Sunday book review – Lost Animals, Disappearing Worlds by Barbara Allen
This book brings together a selection of extinct species, many that have been pushed to global extinction in living memory or at least recently enough to have touched human culture, and tells their stories. In some cases they are given a voice to tell their own stories. It’s a compilation of 30 species (or…
Sunday book review – Seascape by Matthew Yeomans
The author walks from the Gwent Levels in the south to Prestatyn in the north of Wales, not by the shorter route of skirting England but by the longer one of keeping salty water to one side. This isn’t the only book of a coastal walk that I am reading right now – there is…
BSBI press release – New Year Plant Hunt 2025 results
Thousands of citizen scientists find hundreds of wildflowers blooming in midwinter Thousands of citizen scientists took part in the Botanical Society of Britain & Ireland’s fourteenth New Year Plant Hunt to find wild or naturalised plants flowering in midwinter. Their observations are providing us with robust evidence of how our wild plants are responding to a…