National Trust acquires vital new stretch of coastal land to help create a new home for nature Former golf course will help conservation charity create new 30 hectare coastal nature reserve National Trust and partners will start work once restrictions due to Covid-19 are lifted Sand dunes and wetland habitats will be restored to help…
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Guy Shorrock – Chimpanzee
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Guy writes: a couple of weeks ago Mark posted an image of a Mountain Gorilla I had taken during a recent trip to Uganda. In the current lockdown, such things now seem particularly distant. On the same trip I was lucky enough to see chimpanzees on three occasions. Twice on organised trips with habituated troops,…
Bird song (16) – Skylark
Hail to the Skylark – one of the finest songsters of all? Don’t you agree? You won’t find this species very often in your garden but if you live near farmland you may hear its song cascading over everything. This is a pretty unmistakable song – it goes on for ages, it’s loud, it’s musical…
The riches of authorship
I know how some in the shooting industry like to make out that I am coining it in from writing Inglorious and that I’m just in it for the money. So wrong! Here is my latest royalty statement from Bloomsbury as far as it applies to Inglorious. Lots of numbers but if you were to…
A bit of a slow start…
I was listening to George Osborne on The World This Weekend yesterday and heard him say (15m 43s into programme) that his personal opinion was that the current government had got off ‘to a bit of a slow start’ in dealing with coronavirus. I think that is what everybody probably thinks. And in times of…
Pandemics and Passenger Pigeons
Ecologists like myself often have a bit of a blindspot for diseases. We don’t see their impacts very often in wild populations – this may be a particular failing of ornithologists. But there are some good examples of diseases having big impacts on populations – usually, of course, introduced diseases that arrive in a new…
Paul Leyland – Missing-sector Orbweb Spider
Social Distancing Week 3. Missing-sector Orbweb Spider Paul writes: Sometimes a spider’s web is more interesting than the spider itself. You don’t have to look at this web for long before realising how the spider got its English name. The left hand side section of the web contains no spiral threads, hence the missing sector….
The Well-read Naturalist
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I’ve been terribly remiss in not bringing you any news of John Riutta’s book reviews for quite a while, but he went a bit quiet for a time. I see he is back in the swing of things again now. Here are some books reviews by him that made me think in general, and think…
Sunday book review – The Accidental Countryside by Stephen Moss
It’s quite difficult to keep up with reading Stephen Moss’s books – I wonder how he writes them so quickly. But what we have come to expect is good writing with good knowledge of natural history. That is what we get here. The theme of this latest book is urban, or at least man-made, patches…
Tim Melling – Grey-hooded Fulvettas
Tim writes; Grey-hooded Fulvettas (Fulvetta cinereiceps) are endemic to China and occur in high altitude forests with a bamboo understorey. Its scientific name translates as little tawny bird with an ash-coloured head, which describes it quite nicely. I photographed this pair on a frosty twig at about 3000m asl at Labahe in Sichuan. In winter…