Another membership

Last week I went to a trustees’ meeting of Pond Conservation and felt guilty that I hadn’t yet got around actually to joining.  So now I have.  I am a fully paid up member of an excellent but small conservation organisation. It’s interesting that we use (actually, I don’t) pond life as a term of…

Importing diseases

The government is about to spend a pittance on a very serious problem – but it should be celebrated as a start. Our trees are under threat from imported diseases – perhaps from some diseases that stand a better chance of becoming established under new climate scenarios. So Defra and the (unreconstructed) Forestry Commission have…

A tale of three warblers

I find that I carry British Birds around with me for ages before I get around to reading it and so this blog is about the September issue which contains the report of the Rare Breeding Bird Panel. The contrasting fortunes of three warblers struck me as I read through the text; Cetti’s, Savi’s and…

How social is your charity?

A fairly recent ranking of how UK charities use social media makes interesting reading. There is a league table – we all love league tables – which puts the Royal Airforces Association as the 100th charity and Cancer Research as number one. On this list the National Trust is #7, the RSPB is #13, WWF…