Monbiot, Batters on the Vine

I very rarely listen to Radio2 – I am so firmly a Radio4 stick-in-the-mud – so I am grateful to a reader of this blog for pointing me in the direction of the Jeremy Vine show this lunch time (although I feel rather bad about temporarily deserting Martha Kearney) where there was what passes for…

Bird flu – another update

It didn’t take a lot ornithological nous to realise that nine Mute Swans with H5N8 bird flu virus in Dorset were quite likely to have come from Abbotsbury Swannery – as surmised in this blog on Saturday and trumpetted by the national press yesterday (Guardian, Telegraph, BBC). Defra doesn’t test additional birds from a location…

Nature schooling

When Keith Betton interviewed the late, great Phil Hollom in Behind the Binoculars, Hollom said that when he was at school at Cockfosters in the 1920s he had looked out of the window during a school exam and seen a Red-backed Shrike.  This would have been regarded as a mere distraction, though a pleasant one,…

If only…

David Mitchell, or David Mitchell Coren as we might call him, wrote an excellent column on telling the truth yesterday. One of his points, with which I agree, is that the good guys need to be squeaky-clean in this so-called post-truth age. We will only live in a post-truth age if we allow truth to…

Letter to my MP

Dear Mr Pursglove   May I please wish you a happy new year? As you may remember, you and I differ on our views on Brexit – I am still in a slightly depressed mood because of the result of the referendum.  However, I have spotted a silver lining and I thought I would write…