Following Wild Justice’s successful challenge to the legality of the General Licences Defra has issued a consultation and the RSPB has asked its members to respond – see here. The RSPB suggestions are eminently sensible although they might need a bit more scientific justification for DEFRA to take them sufficiently seriously. Wild Justice will be…
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It’s your difficult choice
I’ve been fretting over how to cast my votes in the Birdwatch Birders’ Choice awards. The only one that I have completely decided upon is my choice for the Guano Award for environmental harm – DEFRA deserves to ‘win’ this and let’s hope the results are published before or during an election campaign. Whereas the…
Pretty lame – Woman’s Hour
Yesterday Woman’s Hour (a BBC Radio 4 programme – click here and listen after 23 minutes) got together Minette Batters of the NFU, Marian Spain of Natural England and Beccy Speight of the RSPB on the pretext that there are a lot of women running the environment. In the case of the NFU that is…
Lead
ECHA (the European Chemicals Agency) estimate that 19,000+ tonnes of lead is deposited into the environment in Europe each year (this excludes shooting clay pigeons and similar sport shooting activities, see here). Based on estimates from the ammunition industry the Lead Ammunition Group estimate that 2000 tonnes of that is deposited in the UK (see…
Waitrose warns
I guess many readers of this blog will remember that Waitrose announced in July that by next game season it would be getting its game meat from sources that would guarantee that it will be lead-free. This is excellent news, puts Waitrose at the leading edge of supermarkets on this subject, and is very much…
It’s your choice
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The Birdwatch Birders’ Choice nominations are published – click here. Some difficult choices to be made, as always. But it’s good fun. I’ll be agonising over my voting intentions this week.
The population elephant in the room
About 10 days ago Ian Parsons bravely wrote a guest blog on the subject of population. It elicited a lot of comments as raising this subject almost often does. This post is not a reply to Ian, nor to any of the comments made, but simply comprises some developed thoughts, with some data, on the…
Tim Melling – coitus interruptus
Tim writes: I stumbled upon this macabre scene where a mating pair of Common Blue Damselflies (Enallagma cyathigerum) had become entrapped in the web of a Garden Spider (Araneus diadematus). The spider was busily dispatching the female damselfly, while the male, also entrapped by the web, continued to hold onto her. You can see the…
East Allenheads needs a Magritte, a stuffed alligator and a helipad
Jeremy Herrmann owns two grouse moors in County Durham and Northumberland (Muggleswick and East Allenheads respectively) which have been mentioned in this blog before – see here and here and more recently here. It seems that one Boris Johnson may well have visited East Allenheads for a spot of grouse shooting in 2015. East Allenheads…
Tim Melling – Antarctic Fur Seal
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Tim writes: this is a young Antarctic Fur Seal on a beach on South Georgia where about 95% of the global population breeds. Usually they are with lots of other Fur Seals, and penguins too, but I managed to photograph this one all by itself. Its scientific name Arctocephalus gazella translates as “bear head” while…