The Hendry review is due to be published tomorrow and is expected to recommend the go-ahead for a tidal lagoon project in Swansea Bay. This has been the subject of a variety of posts on this blog: Guest blog – Time for tidal power by Sian John, 15 July 2016; NGO reaction to Swansea Bay…
BLOG POSTS
Guest blog – England’s Serengeti? by Steve Jones
Steve Jones has worked in conservation in the UK and overseas for two decades, promoting wildlife-friendly farming and designated site conservation in the UK, and large mammal conservation in the tropics. He writes on wildlife-friendly farming, land sparing and rewilding at https://naturalareasblog.wordpress.com Making space for wild nature in England’s wheat…
Monbiot, Batters on the Vine
I very rarely listen to Radio2 – I am so firmly a Radio4 stick-in-the-mud – so I am grateful to a reader of this blog for pointing me in the direction of the Jeremy Vine show this lunch time (although I feel rather bad about temporarily deserting Martha Kearney) where there was what passes for…
Bird flu – another update
It didn’t take a lot ornithological nous to realise that nine Mute Swans with H5N8 bird flu virus in Dorset were quite likely to have come from Abbotsbury Swannery – as surmised in this blog on Saturday and trumpetted by the national press yesterday (Guardian, Telegraph, BBC). Defra doesn’t test additional birds from a location…
Nature schooling
When Keith Betton interviewed the late, great Phil Hollom in Behind the Binoculars, Hollom said that when he was at school at Cockfosters in the 1920s he had looked out of the window during a school exam and seen a Red-backed Shrike. This would have been regarded as a mere distraction, though a pleasant one,…
If only…
David Mitchell, or David Mitchell Coren as we might call him, wrote an excellent column on telling the truth yesterday. One of his points, with which I agree, is that the good guys need to be squeaky-clean in this so-called post-truth age. We will only live in a post-truth age if we allow truth to…
Letter to my MP
Dear Mr Pursglove May I please wish you a happy new year? As you may remember, you and I differ on our views on Brexit – I am still in a slightly depressed mood because of the result of the referendum. However, I have spotted a silver lining and I thought I would write…
Hen Harrier InAction Plan
Sometimes something is so awful that you just hope it will go away – and that’s how I feel about the Defra Hen Harrier InAction Plan which fails to address the real problem for the Hen Harrier – that it is illegally killed by grouse shooting interests because it eats Red Grouse that they would…
Oscar Dewhurst – Kestrel
On my first photography outing of 2017 I saw this female kestrel take shelter in this hole from a jackdaw that was mobbing it. It was about 150m from me, but as I have very few (in fact, I think only 1!) images of them I decided to see whether I could get close enough…
Bird flu case was at Slimbridge
I speculated yesterday that avian flu cases involving White-fronted Goose and other species in Gloucestershire might well have been at the WWT nature reserve at Slimbridge and I’m grateful to WWT for confirming that this is the case. If I had lived locally to Slimbridge I might actually have seen them talking about the case…