Ian Parsons spent twenty years as a ranger before running his own wildlife tour business. He now writes books and articles on wildlife. He has contributed many articles to this blog (see here). His book A Vulture Landscape (reviewed here) was published by Whittles Publishing in 2020, this was followed by Seasonality in 2022 (reviewed…
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
Sunday book review – The Peregrine Falcon by Richard Sale and Steve Watson
This is a monumental book about what is regarded as the fastest animal on the planet (or flying over it). At over 500 pages, and amply and attractively illustrated, this is a tribute to and reference source about a marvellous bird. The brilliance of this bird is well captured in many of the photographs but…
Guest blog – A Year of Mixed Fortunes for Scotland’s Beavers by Tom Bowser
Tom Bowser is the owner of Argaty and author of A Sky Full of Kites: A Rewilding Story (reviewed here). Argaty is a working farm based on the Braes of Doune in central Scotland. It has been home to the Bowser family since 1916. The farm has two aims: to produce food in an environmentally…
More on the risk assessment on gamebird releases
The risk assessment published yesterday by Defra, but presumably done by APHA, is vaguely interesting but not spectacularly well-informed. It’s not that well-informed because no-one has invested in studying the process of disease transmission of avian flu to, within, or from wild birds. So there is quite a lot of guesswork dressed up as something…
Bird/poultry flu update
Today I will carefully be reading this, Risk Assessment on the spread of High Pathogenicity Avian Influenza (HPAI) H5N1 to wild birds from released, formerly captive gamebirds in Great Britain: Pheasants (click here), which was rather quietly released by Defra yesterday. My aim is to blog about this by the end of the day, but…