This is a crime novel – a wildlife crime novel – and the story skips along at a fair pace and made me want to keep turning the pages and discover what happened next. It’s not exactly a whodunnit, but more of a willtheygetdunforit. Alan Stewart is a prolific author on wildlife crime. As an…
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Reshuffle
It is difficult to feel very worked up about the reshuffle. It is a reshuffle of a pack of knaves and jokers. At DEFRA, George Eustice remains – I feel more favourable to Mr Eustice than do many. It’s not as though I can imagine myself ever voting for him but he has served a…
Sunday book review – The Amazing Story of Montagu’s Harrier by Elvira Werkman
This is a fine book which I have enjoyed reading on my travels over the last few weeks. I knew I’d find it interesting because it deals with a couple of subjects which are really interesting scientifically and in terms of nature conservation; how wildlife fits in with modern agriculture and which part of a…
Pondering some shooting issues
The partridge shooting season opened on 1 September for both our native Grey Partridge and the non-native Red-legged Partridge. Nearly 12 million RLPs are released normally for recreational shooting puposes which is a phenomenal number and would attract far more attention if it weren’t a figure swamped and dwarfed by the 51 million Pheasants that…
Guillemots
I like a good Guillemot and there are lots of reports of high numbers of them being seen close onshore along the east coast this year. There are concerns that there is something amiss with these birds. Last weekend, on the Ythan Estuary north of Aberdeen, there were lots of Guillemots in the estuary itself…