The Guardian website is running this story ahead of tomorrow’s Observer. It states that the National Trust, Yorkshire Water and United Utilities have all put major restrictions on routine heather burning as practised by grouse shooting interests, and not just for this year. It is of course notable that these three landowners have the public…
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Saturday cartoon by Ralph Underhill
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Press release – Leigh Day and Chris Packham
High Court dismisses application for HS2 judicial review The High Court has today dismissed an application for permission for judicial review of the Prime Minister’s decision to proceed with the HS2 railway project, and a related interim injunction to halt enabling and clearanceworks relating to HS2. Mr Packham, represented by law firm Leigh Day, was…
Bird song (15) – Wren
Wrens are tiny – you’d get 45 Wrens to the lb and 100 to the kg – and yet they have a hell of a song. If a Robin sounds as though it is singing to another Robin about 10 feet away then a Wren sounds as though it is trying to reach the whole…
Clapping
Yesterday evening at 8pm I stood outside my house and clapped. I didn’t do this last week as somehow I missed the fact that it was happening. I was early, I’m always early, I got to the gig at 7:59pm and there was already one guy, down the road, clapping away so I joined in….
Guest blog – Don’t get me wrong – I do like daffodils… by Nick Ballard
Nick Ballard’s interest in butterflies and moths evolved exploring the hedgerows and fields, streams, ditches and ponds, meadows and verges that formed the great outdoors where he lived as a child – Selby, on the river Ouse in Yorkshire. He first worked as a computer operator in Cambridge in the Computer Aided Design centre and…
Some comments on comments
There have been nearly 68,000 comments made on this blog since it sprang into life in spring 2011. Over 9,000 of them have been by me – replying to your comments. The rest have been made by several hundred folk – it would be a very time consumting exercise to work out quite how many…
BTO press release – Volunteers’ data vital in wetland conservation
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Data collected by volunteers as part of the Wetland Bird Survey, and published in a report today, play a crucial role in the designation of protected wetland sites in Great Britain and Northern Ireland, and underline their importance in helping to conserve our waterbirds. Many of the UK’s wetlands are given protected status as a…
Tidy houses, tidy inboxes, messy hair
Being confined to one’s house enables one to do some of that decluttering that never gets done at other times. The inboxes of my email accounts are now slimmed down and many emails are filed away properly and an awful lot are deleted. And the same goes for the house, although that is a much…
The declining Chaffinch?
I received an appeal for money from the BTO recently and its subject was the declining Chaffinch. I wasn’t aware that the Chaffinch was declining – they are still a common widespread bird, and just very parochially, if anything they are commoner now in my garden than they once were. So I looked with interest…