Standing up for Nature
Reviewed by Ian Carter There are plenty of books about wild food these days, describing how to find it and how to make best use of it. This one deals with a comprehensive selection of plants, including seaweeds. It also includes a handful of fungi (just 7 species) but, rather oddly I thought, it ignores…
Tim writes: This will be a familiar bird to anyone who has spent time near a river in SE Asia. They are noisy, bold, and very photogenic. They were once placed in a genus (Chaimarrornis) but molecular studies have shown it is definitely a typical redstart, in the same genus as our two British species. …
Due to circumstances beyond Paul’s control he was not able to add the usual header this week – but I guess you can all live without it, can’t you? Just a teaser, Paul has provided a cracking cartoon for a series of blogs which will appear here next week.
Ralph writes ‘This toon is from the Framing Nature Toolkit to be launched on the 28th of March. You can buy a hard copy or download it for free here.‘.
I’ve been at Cheltenham racecourse this week, and it was just before the last race on Wednesday that our lawyer, Tessa Gregory, phoned me to say that we had had a response from Natural England to our pre-action protocol letter. It wasn’t a very interesting response as NE said that because they were dealing with…
As well as meeting lots of friends, drinking lots of red wine, eating lots of fantastic food and watching horses running around in circles, I did some birding this week. The drive from near Oxford to the racecourse produced the first transect when Red Kite numbers from the car equalled Buzzards – and the Red…
I am a 63 year old retired British and Sultan of Oman’s Army Officer living overseas, in Oman, running a small business advisory consultancy in Muscat, helping small to medium sized British and European Companies achieve business there. I am a salt water (mainly) catch and release fly fisherman who occasionally shoots for the pot (with…
BIG GAME HUNTERS IN AFRICA URGED TO DROP THE LEAD TO HELP SAVE VULTURES! Lead bullet fragments in carcasses left by hunters are poisoning endangered African vultures, a new study has found. A third of all vultures caught and tested in the Botswana study showed elevated levels of lead in their blood, most likely…
Ian Parsons spent twenty years working as a Ranger with the Forestry Commission, where he not only worked with birds of prey and dormice, but where he developed his passion for trees. Now a freelance writer, Ian runs his own specialist bird tour company leading tours to Extremadura. For more details see www.griffonholidays.com This is…
I’m off to Cheltenham for three days at the races. I know that this is a subject that leaves some readers of this blog cold, others will be annoyed that I spend my time in this way, and yet others will wish they were there too. Any of those reactions is fine – but I’m…