The week before last, I wrote a couple of blogs about my visit to Cheltenham racecourse for the first three days of the Cheltenham Festival (of racing). Those blogs were about birds and about people and this blog is about betting; next weekend I will post a blog about horse welfare. Horse racing is about…
BLOG POSTS
Sunday book review – Under the Stars by Matt Gaw
It is only March, and I hope to read lots of brilliant books through the rest of 2020, but I am pretty sure this volume will be in this blog’s list of books of the year. It’s a slim volume, fewer than 200 pages of text and quite well-spaced text at that, but it packs…
Tim Melling – Asian Barred Owlet
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Tim writes: unlike most owls, Asian Barred Owlet is a daytime-active species. It sits around on open perches like this, and drops down onto its prey, which is usually large insects, but also lizards, small mammals and birds. It also goes by the name of Cuckoo Owlet and its scientific name Taenioglaux cuculoides translates as…
Saturday cartoon by Ralph Underhill
Natural solace (2)
On my way back from hearing my first Chiffchaff I came home the pretty way, along the quiet by-road, with the potholes, through the fields, and I saw in front of me, to my left, a Red Kite suddenly arch in mid air and dive down towards a field of sheep. Now I wasn’t expecting…
Looking ahead
My calendar is emptying rapidly – I expect yours is too. There are talks I’ve been asked to give which have been cancelled, no surprises there, and events to which I was hoping to go which have been cancelled or postponed. Even attending a family wedding in June looks somewhat up in the air… However,…
No surprise – and very sensible
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Bird song (8) – Chiffchaff
When I was a lad, birding just south of Bristol, my aim was to hear a Chiffchaff in March rather than let that event slip into April. In fact, my aim was to hear a Chiffchaff before my birthday on 29 March. I usually did it, but not always – that’s why it was a…
Petitions update
But here is an update on the new petitions that I told you about 10 days or so ago: Publish the Russia report, now 53,702 signatures (was 23,953 signatures) Make Hedgehogs a Protected Species, now 42,455 signatures (was 6557 signatures) Legal rights for ancient trees, now 5,354 signatures (was 607 signatures) Don’t criminalise trespass, now…
A year ago
A year ago this very important paper looking at the fate of satellite-tagged Hen Harriers was published in Nature Communications. It’s open access and so you can read it but it does take quite a bit of reading. Here is my post from last year which explains what the paper found – several people have…