More reading over the Christmas break

Spiny Lobsters, Breckland moths, Little Terns and articles about future land use and changing naturalists as well as some regular favourites, of which by greatest favourite is the ancient and wise Twitcher in the Swamp.

January Birdwatch

Much as I love Christmas, I was pleased that the January Birdwatch dropped through the letter box this morning. You may find me slipping away to a quiet place in the house to read it over the next few days. No spoilers here but the winners of the Birders’ Awards are all very worthy winners….

Letter to my MP

Dear Mr Pursglove I must write to congratulate you on your return as my MP and with a significantly increased majority. I voted for your main opponent in the election, Beth Miller, but I still wish you well in parliament. However, I do have several concerns about the direction that the Johnson government is going…

From the Guardian…

Sir Stephen Houghton, the Labour leader of Barnsley council, said … there needed to be a review of whether agricultural practices upstream, such as the burning of heather moorland and removal of peat, were causing rainwater to rush downstream and rivers to burst their banks in residential areas. PM urged to overhaul flood defence funding…

Guest blog – Woodland Musing 1 by Louise Bacon

As a volunteer, I spend about a day a week from late October through to Easter cutting down trees. ‘Shock horror!’ say the urban tree-huggers. Actually, I could equally have written that I spend a day a week engaged in the traditional rural craft of coppicing.  I prefer to think of it as the latter….

Tim Melling – the Sichuan Treecreeper

Tim writes: the Common Treecreeper was described new to science back in 1758, and even its near-identical cousin Short-toed Treecreeper was described back in 1820.  But this Sichuan Treecreeper was described new to science from 14 collected specimens in 1995, when it was thought to be a subspecies of Common Treecreeper.  But Common Treecreeper was…

A few things…

I got an email response from SNH today with some clarification of the information on wild hacking. I’ve altered Wednesday’s blog post accordingly. The effect of this is that it appears that the absences of birds at hack were much shorter in time than I had thought – that’s quite important. 2. Labour doesn’t appear…