Standing up for Nature
The author of this book was probably Britain’s first professional amphibian conservationist and his recollections of the evolution of the subject go back over five decades. Such insider accounts are valuable records of how we got to the current day. An idea of the importance of Arnold Cooke’s contributions to the field can be gauged…
Those who have worked at the RSPB Headquarters at Sandy, and some who have gone there for meetings, will have seen the portrait of Hudson above the stone fireplace in what used to be called the main meeting room where, long ago, staff used to have lunch served to them. He became a familiar sight,…
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…
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…
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…
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 the transparency data on the Defra website are out of date despite being updated on 27 July 2023 – yes, yesterday!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…
You couldn’t make it up, but then, you don’t have to. The latest non-exec appointment to the Defra Board, made by the Secretary of State Therese Coffey herself, is a grouse moor owner from the Yorkshire Dales on whose grouse moor two Hen Harriers are reported to have disappeared. Although Defra somehow manage not to…
I’ve been looking forward to this book for ages. It arrived yesterday and thanks to a rainy day I was able to spend much of yesterday (and some of today) getting to grips with it. It was worth the wait. I tend to think of the early modern era as involving The Beatles but here…
Now I’ve been a wildlife freak almost all of my 72 years and for much of my working life, it was part, even if sometimes tangentially of what I did. My main interest is/was raptors but not to the exclusion of anything else, if it flies, crawls, walks, swims, slithers or just flowers I’m interested…
Miles King has worked in nature conservation for over 35 years. For the last eight he has run the charity People Need Nature, which promotes the sensory emotional and spiritual values of nature in people’s everyday lives. He tweets far too often as @milesking10 and also writes the occasional blog at www.anewnatureblog.com The Poundbury for…