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Sunday book review – Birds of the UK Overseas Territories edited by Roger Riddington

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The UK Overseas Territories (UKOTs) are 14 remnants of the British Empire which have the British monarch as their Head of State, depend on the UK for their defence and which all have coastlines. All are closer, geographically, to other sovereign nations than they are to the UK but all have strong cultural ties to…

Sunday book review – A Vulture Landscape by Ian Parsons

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Ian Parsons has written more than 20 guest blogs here and so is a fairly familiar name to this blog’s readers. But when not writing for this blog he is a nature tour leader in Extremadura and this blog is about that land, west of Madrid and stretching to the Portuguese border, its wildlife and…

Tim Melling – Swift

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Tim writes: there does not seem to be a collective noun for Swifts other than the prosaic “flock”, and the implausible “scream”.  It seems surprising that so many birds have special collective nouns yet the highly gregarious Swift has none.  That’s probably because such terms were used by hunters (or collectors) and nobody in their…

New General Licences coming soon?

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Last year DEFRA carried out a consultation on general licences in England – this was forced by the successful Wild Justice legal challenge of the Natural England general licences. Over 4,000 responses were received , which is quite a lot, but not so many as to justify such a long wait for any decisions from…