BLOG POSTS

Sunday book review – Collins Bird Guide (3rd edition) by Lars Svensson, Killian Mullarney and Dan Zetterstrom

Mark Comments Off on Sunday book review – Collins Bird Guide (3rd edition) by Lars Svensson, Killian Mullarney and Dan Zetterstrom

An identification guide is a functional thing – it exists so that the reader (or looker) can put a name, they hope the right name, to some creature. These are not the books that one picks up to read, or re-read over the years. They are the books one takes out into the field and…

Letter to my MP

Mark 1 Comment

Dear Mr Pursglove, Happy New Year! Thank you for the letter, dated 20 January from Defra which you passed on to me and I received yesterday. I am grateful to you for your efforts on my behalf. However, the letter was in response to your letter on 18 August when you forwarded my letter to…

Low Standards at Defra – I complain

Mark 1 Comment

Defra Service Standards Adjudicator I wrote to my MP on 10 August last year about the failure of Defra to respond properly to a parliamentary petition. My MP, Tom Pursglove, forwarded my letter to George Eustice (then Secretary of State, Defra) on 18 August.  Yesterday, 24 January, I received a reply from Defra (from Trudy…

Guest blog – Calling it for what it is by Ian Parsons

Mark 18 Comments

Ian Parsons spent twenty years as a ranger before running his own wildlife tour business. He now writes books and articles on wildlife.  He has contributed many articles to this blog (see here). His book A Vulture Landscape (reviewed here) was published by Whittles Publishing in 2020, this was followed by Seasonality in 2022 (reviewed…

More on the risk assessment on gamebird releases

Mark 3 Comments

The risk assessment published yesterday by Defra, but presumably done by APHA, is vaguely interesting but not spectacularly well-informed. It’s not that well-informed because no-one has invested in studying the process of disease transmission of avian flu to, within, or from wild birds. So there is quite a lot of guesswork dressed up as something…

Bird/poultry flu update

Mark 3 Comments

Today I will carefully be reading this, Risk Assessment on the spread of High Pathogenicity Avian Influenza (HPAI) H5N1 to wild birds from released, formerly captive gamebirds in Great Britain: Pheasants (click here), which was rather quietly released by Defra yesterday. My aim is to blog about this by the end of the day, but…

Sunday book review – The Diary of a Secret Tory MP by Anon

Mark 3 Comments

This book did make me laugh out loud. And that’s quite an achievement because it attempts to satirise the awfulness of the current bunch of Tories in Westminster whose collective awfulness is almost beyond parody. Almost, but not actually as this author does a great job in exaggerating the behaviour and callousness and making it both…

The inaugural Michael Marks Environmental Poet of the Year Prize

Mark Comments Off on The inaugural Michael Marks Environmental Poet of the Year Prize

Yesterday evening I attended a poetry award evening in the British Library as one of the three judges of the inaugural Michael Marks Environmental Poet of the Year competition. The winner was Linda France’s collection of poems, Letters to Katlia, as pictured above – and it was good to hear her reading one of her…