I am drawn to difficult problems. I spent the first five years of my career helping companies solve their most complex business problems with L.E.K. Consulting, and in the last few years I have become particularly interested in the UK’s land use conundrum. What do we want from our land, and how do we get…
BLOG POSTS
A trivial matter
When you have a blog and website, and I guess it might depend on whether your site is seen to be ‘successful’ or not, you get a lot of unsolicited emails about advertising and completely irrelevant guest posts. I reply to most of these with a polite ‘no thanks’, but I do reply. I had…
Lockdown and Birdtrack again
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The Birdtrack reporting rate graphs for Britain and Ireland for two species show a pretty convincing impact of lockdown on avian reporting rates – as suggested in an earlier blog post here. Here is the graph for House Sparrow for this year and the historical data: So this shows that for the early part of…
Cuckoo
I was bathing in bird song again this morning – from about 410am. A Cuckoo sang from 415am – 445am. Probably because it is a low-pitched song it was quite difficult to locate its direction. The sound to which I listened was clearly bouncing off the wall of my own house because that was very…
Is it wild hacking time in Scotland?
You might remember a series of blogs I’ve written about wild hacking of Gyr Falcons in two parts of Scotland. Last year SNH licensed the temporary release of 100 Gyr Falcons in Ayrshire and 150 in Moray in the period 1 June to September and with no more than 40 at a time in each…
My car
My car is in limping mode and the garage says it might cost a lot of money to get it fully back up to speed (literally). But after 254,000 miles, the last 190,000 of them in our care, it certainly doesn’t owe anyone anything. Given that we last put fuel in the car over two…
A few things
I’m trying to write something for this blog about Curlew, but each time I try, I get in a mess. It’s because there is too much to write for one blog post and I can’t get it straight in my mind as to how to structure it. So you’ll have to wait – although until…
After…things I would like to be different (5)
The Westminster Petitions System I’m a keen supporter of the idea that an ordinary citizen can initiate a petition to parliament which, if supported by enough fellow citizens, then receives a response from government. This seems to me to be a modern manifestation of an ancient right which goes back to and beyond Magna Carta….
After…things I would like to be different (4)
A move away from meat eating. I’m nowhere near vegetarian, and even further away from being vegan, but my meat consumption is very low these days. Particularly these days because it’s summer – and I love salads – and because it tends to be when eating out that I am tempted into eating more meat…
Paul Leyland – Large Narcissus Fly
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Social Distancing Week 10. Large Narcissus Fly. Paul writes: I’ve started seeing this distinctive fly around the village in the last week. It will be a regular visitor to a lot of gardens at this time of year. The Large Narcissus Fly (Meredon equestris) is a hoverfly which is so named because its larvae develop…