Our poll still has a day to run as I write, so I shouldn’t draw conclusions based on the exact number of votes cast for each of our twelve New Elizabethan Naturalists. What I can say is that I am very glad we did the poll for two main reasons. First, it has been an…
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
Great new Elizabethan naturalists – the result
With over 800 votes cast, the final rankings were as follows: David Attenborough 270 votes Peter Scott 211 votes Gerald Durrell 111 votes Derek Ratcliffe 89 votes Norman Moore 55 votes Max Nicholson 33 votes Jane Goodall 33 votes David Lack 28 votes Miriam Rothschild 25 votes James Fisher 6 votes Tony Soper 6 votes…
Queen saves countryside, Steve Bell thinks not…
I do like Steve Bell’s Guardian cartoons – they usually make me laugh although I know they won’t be too everyone’s taste. Was this one stimulated by the Sunday Express headline a few weeks ago which stated that ‘Queen saves countryside’? Would cormorant now be added to the list?…
Prof Sir John Lawton says…
…that the Chancellor, George Gideon Oliver Osborne, is a ‘bloody idiot’ on the subject of wildlife protection. Sir John, or actually, I see, John Hartley Lawton, is a Vice President of the RSPB, a Fellow of the Royal Society, a good birdwatcher, was the last chair of the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution (deceased), is…
Cormorants are next
In what seems like undue haste, the hunting, shooting and fishing brigade have moved on to cormorants after failing (at least for a while) to get a receptive government department to licence some buzzard bothering. Cormorants are an easier target because they aren’t very pretty. Don’t get me wrong, they are quite pretty (in an…
Is your MP in this list – mine isn’t?
The Rio+20 conference on sustainable development is happening right now (I’ve been blogging about it for the RSPB over the last 20 days). Stop Climate Chaos produced a Rio declaration and I asked my MP, Louise Mensch to sign up. I got a good detailed reply from Ms Mensch but I noticed that she didn’t…
Euro 2012 – the political and environmental lessons so far
Sixteen countries started the Euro 2012 journey and now their number has been reduced to eight. Three of these 16 countries were non-EU countries and all have exited the competition. Eight of the original countries use the Euro as their currency (France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Netherlands, Portugal and Spain) whereas eight do not (Croatia,…
Wuthering Moors 19 – what is Defra hiding?
If you track back to 2 April on this blog you will find that I made Freedom of Information Act and Environmental Information Regulation requests to Defra and Natural England. Defra failed to respond to those requests until sending me a letter dated 4 May saying that they needed another 20 working days to respond. …
No worries, mate! Australia grabs headlines over marine reserves and UK says nothing.
I’m a bit surprised that we haven’t heard any great announcement from the UK ahead of the Rio conference. Often good news stories are squirrelled away to be produced (to mix analogies) like rabbits out of hats for maximum effect. This must have been what the Australian government had in mind when making a recent…
Going cuckoo – or gone cuckoo?
We are within days of the summer solstice and I haven’t had my spring yet! There’s plenty of time for there to be a baking hot summer but I am not necessarily expecting it. And it’s turning out to be a funny old spring/summer. For a start, England have played two games of football and…