The following statement was made by the Secretary of State for DEFRA, George Eustice MP, in parliament on Thursday: Statement In May 2018, Defra commissioned Julian Glover and an independent panel to consider how we might improve the management of our National Parks and Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty (AONBs). Their report, the Landscapes Review,…
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
Climate Change Committee 2021 report
The massively impressive latest report by the Climate Change Committee was published on Thursday. I will never read all of it – who will? But I have skimmed through som parts of it and my eye alighted on this rap over DEFRA’s knuckles on their inadequate measures to limit damage to peatlands from burning; That…
Sunday book review – The Glitter in the Green by Jon Dunn
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I remember my first hummingbird. I was sitting on a log in a forest in Canada hoping to see a Beaver (I didn’t) when I heard a whirring sound behind me. I turned, wondering whether I was about to eyeball a large dangerous insect, and was relieved and delighted to see a Ruby-throated Hummingbird feeding…
Sunday book review – Three Million Wheelbarrows by Kathleen Saunders
This is a very interesting book – there is practically nothing in it about wildlife but it is the story of engineering works in The Fens in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It’s a late part of the subjugation of wildness in the lowlands inland from The Wash in Norfolk and Cambridgeshire (mostly). As…
Sunday book review – Human, Nature by Ian Carter
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Ian Carter has a close association with this blog being a regular commenter, a writer of guest blogs and a contributor of a series of articles on Wild Food and another entitled A Break from Humanity. A very small proportion of that collection of work finds its way into this book – probably what Ian…
Letter to my MP
Dear Mr Pursglove I hope you are well, This email is to keep you informed about some matters which mean a lot to me – as your website suggests I should. On Monday there are two environmental subjects being discussed in Parliament that are of concern for me: driven grouse shooting and the Environment Bill,…
Letter to the Royal Family
I was one of many signatories to this letter – click here – asking the Royal Family to rewild some of their landholdings. You could write too – see here. This would be quite a good place to start, and would have massive knock-on impacts locally;
An interesting paper
This paper, open access, was published overnight. The Summary does, unusually for a scientific paper, sum it up!
Sparrow update
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Last week I told you about the apparently lone female House Sparrow raising a brood of chicks in my neighbour’s roof. Possibly before that blog was published last week, very early on Saturday morning, the brood fledged and the female was feeding them in my garden and next door. The male, or any male, played…
BBS completed
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Last week I revisited ‘my’ two Breeding Bird Survey squares to carry out the second surveys at each to complete the data collection for 2021. BBS1, as I shall call it, is arable farmland and I have now completed 17 years of surveying it for the national scheme, and BBS2 is mostly farmland by the…