Just a few things that caught my eye beaver chips for beavers and for Christmas badger e-petition seems a bit stuck around 65,000 signatures hardback copies of A Message from Martha – all gone! online auction for elephants by World Land Trust more young people (apparently that is 16-34 – so not very young!) are…
BLOG POSTS
Book review – The Nature of Sex by Carin Bondar
This book is a review about how animals beget other animals. It must be quite difficult to write about sex in a way that is neither coy nor coarse and which will keep the attention of the reader with whatever moral and personal baggage they might bring to the subject. The author tells us of…
‘Defending our way of life’
In this month’s copy of The Field there is a page about the role of the the GWCT’s science in defending ‘our way of life’ which is surely a misprint for ‘our hobby of death’. The article is written by the GWCT’s chair, the tadpole conserver himself, Mr Ian Coghill, and it is basically an…
The minister’s speech
On the last day of October our e-petition to ban driven grouse shooting (123,077 signatures) was debated alongside another, so-called rival, e-petition to protect grouse shooting (which still languishes under 25,000 signatures despite being over half way through its allotted time). Having let a month pass I’ll now return to what was said on that…
Nice crowds
I was talking about grouse shooting at a joint Dorset Bird Club and BTO conference on Saturday and to the Bedfordshire Bird Club on Tuesday evening. Both were really nice groups of people. The advantage of a conference is that you hear others speak too and I really enjoyed hearing Nick Moran on Birdtrack (great…
Guest blog – Otters by Kevin Parr
Kevin Parr is a writer, angler and amateur naturalist from West Dorset. He is the author of Rivers Run, The Idle Angler and The Twitch (which was this blog’s book of the year in 2014) and writes regularly for a variety of publications including BBC CountryFile Magazine and Fallon’s angler. …
Vultures and lead
A new study from Spain, the stronghold of the European Griffon Vulture population, shows that blood lead levels are higher in vultures living in areas with high lead soil levels but also in areas with high lead ammunition use for game shooting. Nearly half of the vultures had elevated lead levels, a little under 5%…
More dull techy stuff
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I think that the changes to this website – many of which will have passed many of you by (I know) – have generally been successful. The site is (according to data) loading a lot quicker (please tell me if you have problems). The collateral damage that seemed to accompany that was that some links…
It’s time for Ian Botham to be a winner again
Ian Botham deserves to be a winner again – and he deserves to win Birdwatch magazine’s guano award for environmental harm as part of the YFTB team. So please vote for him here. You’ll have to vote in each of the other categories too, but I bet you’ll find some familiar names and events to…
BPOTY competition
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The Bird Photographer of The Year competition always provides a feast of superb images. If you would like to enter an image then you have until midnight on Wednesday to do so – here are the details (and there are many categories). This Little Ringed Plover (by Marc Albiac) won the Cameron Belspolka Trust category…