The line-up for the Birders’ Choice Guano Award for Environmental Harm is a strong field: litter bugs HS2 Boris Johnson Trump administration Water companies Well, I found this quite easy – how about you? Water companies aren’t all bad, litter is annoying but its apparent resurgence in lockdown was more an eye-opener of the fact…
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A week tomorrow
A week tomorrow the Wild Justice judicial review of the legality of releasing tens of millions of non-native gamebirds, without ensuring that those releases will not damage sites of conservation importance, will take place. The legal arguments are best left to lawyers but the science is open to anyone to inspect and comment upon. Here…
Marcus Rashford’s petition
Have you signed Marcus Rashford’s petition on free school meals? I have, even though I am quite persuaded by the argument that there are better ways to spend the money to help the poor at this time. But it’s a relatively small amount of money and even if some of it was wasted it’s a…
Songbird Survival looking for a CEO – no conservation knowledge or experience necessary
Here’s an opportunity to earn £50,000+ per annum leading an organisation with 1700 members which is the ‘voice for songbirds’. Membership is £20 per annum and of that almost £10 goes to the research fund. So membership subscriptions seem to fund only a third of the CEO salary at most. According to the Charity Commission…
News from Iceland
The troubles of the sole Fin whaling company in Iceland, Hvalur hf, continue as last week they lost a legal case and have been ordered to pay wages owed to the amount of 100.000.000kr, more than £540,000. Hvalur hf may well appeal. And just because I can, I’ll link to this video of my favourite…
Guest blog – Can One Word Bring About the Mass Restoration of Nature? by Chris Millward
Chris Millward was born in Birmingham, grew up watching wildlife in South Staffordshire and, after reading the 2013 State of Nature report, founded Team4Nature which does exactly what it says on the tin! I was five years old and playing in my back garden. I must have had my fill of playing with “Humpty Dumpty”…
Sunday book review – Birds of the UK Overseas Territories edited by Roger Riddington
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The UK Overseas Territories (UKOTs) are 14 remnants of the British Empire which have the British monarch as their Head of State, depend on the UK for their defence and which all have coastlines. All are closer, geographically, to other sovereign nations than they are to the UK but all have strong cultural ties to…
Sunday book review – A Vulture Landscape by Ian Parsons
Ian Parsons has written more than 20 guest blogs here and so is a fairly familiar name to this blog’s readers. But when not writing for this blog he is a nature tour leader in Extremadura and this blog is about that land, west of Madrid and stretching to the Portuguese border, its wildlife and…
Tim Melling – Swift
Tim writes: there does not seem to be a collective noun for Swifts other than the prosaic “flock”, and the implausible “scream”. It seems surprising that so many birds have special collective nouns yet the highly gregarious Swift has none. That’s probably because such terms were used by hunters (or collectors) and nobody in their…