I’m no botanist, so for all I know this book could be riddled with awful errors, but it is a lovely, lovely book. In a 400-page book, 300 of the pages are given over to about 100 species accounts; each with a distribution map, a photograph of the species, a photograph of the habitat and…
BLOG POSTS
Cuckoo – Tim Melling
Tim writes: I thought this was quite a dramatic flight shot of a Cuckoo flying past like a paper dart. I took this one in the Peak District when there were two males chasing each other on the moors. Cuckoos are suffering a massive population nosedive in Britain, but particularly those in England. All British…
Fake news (6) by Diogenes
Saturday cartoon by Ralph Underhill
Wildlife groups call for end to burning of upland bogs
Twenty six Wildlife and Countryside Link members recently wrote to DEFRA calling for an end to the burning of upland bogs (primarily for intensive grouse shooting). Click here for the letter and click here for the accompanying press release.
NFU – there’s a useful course…
‘The NFU reacted angrily…’ is a common occurrence – try searching for it online and you’ll find a lot of examples. Today’s example, at least as reported on Today, is the NFU reaction to Ian Boyd’s suggestion that the future British countryside will have more hedges and trees and fewer grazing animals in it. This…
Peak District bird surveys
Some bird surveys in the Peak District have been published. Well, actually, that’s not quite true; some rather obviously selective analyses of some bird surveys done in the Peak District have been promoted but not properly published. See here, here and here. Despite the fact that there is some celebratory social media coverage of these…
Garden birds October 2019
October has been a good month for birds with four new species for the garden list for the year – two of which were garden lifers! All four species were recorded on 22 or 23 October during a period of good weather when sitting in the garden with a cup of tea was not just…
Look into autumn
I’ve always liked; No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heraclitus The same is true of autumn. Just now the autumn colours are lovely round here – hardly spectacular but wonderful in an understated English way – simply lovely. When I…
Murmuration
This is the season of Starling murmurations. On Monday i visited a local nature reserve, Summer Leys south of Wellingborough, and to the south of the road a little west of the car park there was a good display of Starlings swirling around over the reedbed before they dived into it to roost. It wasn’t…