Bird song (45) – Nightjar

I think of Nightjars as being birds of southern England but they are actually quite widely found in the UK including parts of Wales, northern England and southern Scotland. But I first heard them on the Somerset Levels in my youth and my strongest memories of them are on heathlands in Dorset, Hampshire, Norfolk and…

Brood meddling doomed for 2020?

Natural England is expected soon to bow to the almost inevitable and drop any plans for brood meddling of Hen Harriers in 2020. All Natural England fieldwork is suspended at the moment in line with government instructions on non-essential travel. Natural England is re-allocating staff resources to priority areas in an attempt to ensure that…

Lockdown Nature-writing challenge

At the time of writing there have been 91 votes cast for your favourite of the dozen entries (probably more by now) in this challenge to write about nature and lockdown. One entry has 20 of the 91 votes and one has a single vote: and the rest are strung out pretty evenly across the…

Bird song (44) – Corncrake

Much more often heard, often at night, than seen, the Corncrake was once found in every county in Britain and Ireland – that’s about 150 years ago. But it made the mistakes of nesting in grasslands and needing to produce lots of young every year to survive. Corncrakes are short-lived – only 25-30% of adults…

And yet another week…

The UK is the country (out of 180+) with the third highest number of reported COVID-19 deaths … … but more importantly, it is the country with the fourth highest deaths per capita of population (ignoring Andorra and San Marino) . As predicted here last week, it didn’t take much predictive skill, we have overtaken…