There is wildlife everywhere and that includes our big cities, towns and villages. This shouldn’t come as a surprise really, but we are so wedded to the idea that our own activities are driving wildlife abundance down (as they are) that we, perhaps subconsciously, believe that built up areas must be the worst possible places…
Author: Mark
Sunday book review – Tickets for The Ark by Rebecca Nesbit
I think this is a good book and it ranges rather more widely than its extended title might suggest. The author picks up many issues connected with how we do nature conservation and why we do it in the way that we do. Much of the book is about values, and about the choices that…
Sunday book review – The Role of Birds in World War Two by Nicholas Milton.
I know Nicholas Milton from quite a long way back and I reviewed, favourably, a previous book of his, Neville Chamberlain’s Legacy, here. When I get one of Nicholas’s books I tend to think, ‘I wonder whether I’ll be interested in that’ but it seems that I always am, and I think that’s partly because…
Wild Justice Badger challenge in Northern Ireland
Last week the Northern Ireland Department of Agriculture, Environment and Rural Affairs announced details of its planned Badger cull. This week Wild Justice and the Northern Ireland Badger Group filed papers in the Royal Courts of Justice seeking permission for judicial review of that decision. Wild Justice, which is meeting all the costs of the…
The shooting of Woodcock
Woodcock shooting is a somewhat hidden activity – few birders, I think, realise the scale of shooting with something like 160,000 birds being shot each year. The UK population is around 110,000 birds in spring (based on there being c55,000 males) and so if all Woodcock shot in the UK were UK-bred the population wouldn’t…