This is an excellent book produced by a local natural history society to celebrate its 70 years of existence. It takes 70 local species and tells the reader interesting things about them. We meet the Red Squirrels of Mersea Island, the coastal Brent Goose, Essex Skipper, Fisher’s Estuarine Moth, the Abberton Weevil, Giant Puffball, a…
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Guest blog – Don’t Look Around You by Barry Kemp
I am recently retired but have spent the last 20 years working as an ecologist, primarily in the conservation of our native reptile and amphibian species. During this time I had to deal with many housing developers and the message I and other ecologists were always trying to get across was that our biodiversity was…
RSPB – Mass death of seabirds across UK and Europe following winter storms underlines fragility of populations
Mass death of seabirds across UK and Europe following winter storms underlines fragility of populations The RSPB is calling for the urgent nationwide delivery of actions to support seabirds following the reported deaths of hundreds of Puffins, Guillemots and other species, with potentially thousands of birds affected across the UK and Europe. Seabirds have been…
Sunday book review – Love is a Toad by Lucy Lapwing
The author of this book, Lucy, is a friend and colleague with whom I’ve worked at Wild Justice and on other projects and I was nervous about whether I would get on with this book. After all, she is a young person, the same age as my kids, and young people see the world in…
Why Hen Harriers don’t prosper in the Forest of Bowland and what could be done about it
Introduction: This blog was prompted by reading the Draft Management Plan for the Forest of Bowland National Landscape (the new name for the Forest of Bowland Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty). I have written several earlier versions of this blog and electronically ripped them up and put them in the bin. This is where I…
More or Less nonsense
The BBC Radio 4 programme More or Less is, more or less, right up my street because it is about numbers and statistics and their use and misuse and quite often about logic and public argument and the absence of the former from the latter. If I’m in the car and it’s on the radio…
Paul Racey talks bats (and more).
This – click here – is an interesting chat with Prof Paul Racey who was my PhD supervisor many years ago. He’s a great guy, was a very good mentor to me and has done an awful lot for bat conservation and bat science over the years. Amongst some reminiscences (which I’m afraid include my…
Research in Cumbria explores how fungal networks shape upland treescapes
New scientific research in Cumbria explores how hidden fungal networks shape treescapes in the UK’s uplands Cumbria Connect, the landscape-scale nature recovery programme, has secured new funding for its science programme to investigate how underground fungal networks influence the success of woodland creation in Cumbria’s upland landscapes, at a time of unprecedented national ambition to…
Guest blog – Walshaw Turbine 15 of CEP (240 MW) by Nick MacKinnon
Nick MacKinnon is a freelance teacher of Maths, English and Medieval History, and lives above Haworth, in the last inhabited house before Top Withens = Wuthering Heights. In 1992 he founded the successful Campaign to Save Radio 4 Long Wave while in plaster following a rock-climbing accident on Skye. His poem ‘The metric system’ won…
RSPB – Capercaillies at Abernethy Forest
Boost for one of the UK’s rarest birds at key site The RSPB has revealed a promising increase in the number of Capercaillie at RSPB Abernethy in Scotland with 30 lekking males recorded in 2025, a 50% increase since 2020. The Capercaillie was once more widely spread across the UK but is now confined to native pinewood forests of Scotland where their total population is estimated at 532 birds. The…