Sunday book review – Wildlife in the Balance by Simon Mustoe

  This is a very good book and contains a great number of insights into how animal ecology works and what we get from all those species of animal out there. Plants don’t get much of a look-in, which is strange at first, and will annoy many folk out there, but actually that is part…

Sunday book review – INN Search of Birds by John Lawton

This is a fun book by a birder and one of the UK’s most eminent population ecologists. Prof Sir John Lawton CBE FRS has won numerous awards for his science and was the chair of a group which produced an important report known, as the Lawton report, Making Space for Nature, which recommended that England…

Sunday book review – Island to Island by Sally Mills

This is a follow up to the same author’s Island to Island (reviewed here) but with the subtitle ‘A collection of photographs – the pictures behind the story‘.  And it is  a book of photographs with some words joining them together from the island of Aride in the Seychelles where the author was a warden…

The Defra board – hardly a model of independent scrutiny

Following yesterday’s blog about the appointment of Heather Hancock, grouse moor owner, as lead non-exec on the Defra Board a few more points. the transparency data on the Defra website are out of date despite being updated on 27 July 2023 – yes, yesterday! They have information about former non-exec directors but nothing about Heather…