The mystery of the dying hedge – solved!

Regular readers of this blog will remember the mystery of the dying hedge near where I live in Northamptonshire (see here, here and all the comments on the blogs). Local artist , and designer of the jacket for A Message from Martha, Carry Akroyd, once painted this hedge because it was so beautiful (see below)….

Guest blog – Where green objectives clash by Peter Marren

Peter Marren is the first person to have their third Guest Blog on this site (see here and here for his previous Guest Blogs). Peter used to work for an excellent organisation called the Nature Conservancy Council (who remembers them? – and yes we didn’t always think they were excellent at the time but how…

Oscar Dewhurst – Coots fighting

  Oscar writes: On the day I took this, most of the water on my local nature reserve was frozen, forcing the majority of the ducks to congregate on the small areas of open water remaining. The coots, one of the most territorial of the birds there, kept getting into scraps with each other but they never…

My BGBW #BGBW

  I’ve just finished my Big Garden Birdwatch. I started at 1030 but then was on the phone for quite a while.  Whose ears were burning? It was a good BGBW – no cats and lots of birds!     Blackbird 4 Chaffinch 2 Reed Bunting 1 House Sparrow 4 Great Tit 1 Starling 5…

A lovely email from the USA

Still writing to an end-January deadline so little time for reading. Here instead is an email from America, forwarded to me by my publisher: Hello, Mark I just finished reading A MESSAGE FROM MARTHA…I have overwhelming sadness at the destruction of such a prolific bird, and I have anger mixed with sadness for the ignorance…