Standing up for Nature
This is an interesting book – a translation of a book by the Kazakh poet Yessengali Raushanov who died last year. The book is organised by species, over 30 species of bird, many of which are familiar to a UK audience, with a few extra bird-related essays included too. One learns something of the folklore,…
This afternoon the Wild Justice petition calling for an end to Badger shooting will be ‘debated’ in Westminster Hall by backbench MPs and will receive statements from Shadow and actual DEFRA ministers. No doubt the debate will wander all over the place with MPs spouting quite a lot of nonsense that makes them look foolish…
On Friday a new scientific analysis of the effectiveness of Badger culls on reducing bovine tuberculosis in cattle was published. I knew this paper was coming and knew that it would be greeted with acclaim by those who oppose the cull and derision by those who support it, and that has largely been true. The…
Barbara Lorna Hudson grew up on a farm in Cornwall, where there was a ruined farmhouse with barn owls in residence. After studying at Newnham College, Cambridge and the Universities of Chicago and Newcastle, she worked as a social worker for several years before becoming a social work lecturer at the London School of Economics…
I like books that have clear titles, ones which tell you what they are about, provided the title actually does tell you what the book is about. And this one does. If you can’t work out what this book is about from the title then I can’t help you. But I can tell you that…
Wild Justice is raising money to challenge the lawfulness of a proposed cull of Badgers in Northern Ireland. We’ve got together with the Northern Ireland Badger Group. At nearly £24k in 10 days that’s pretty good going, and there is more cash arriving every day that we can transfer across, but there’s still a long…
Dear Mr Pursglove Just a quick note to say that I’d like to draw your attention to a debate on a successful petition that will take place in Westminster Hall at 4.30pm on Monday 14 March. It’s title is Ban the shooting of badgers immediately and it received over 106,000 signatures and so it has…
A cracking issue of British Birds this month (as almost every month) with an attractive Common Scoter on the cover alerting the reader to a fascinating paper (Metcalf, Bradnum, Dunning and Lees) inside describing overland nocturnal migration of this duck across Britain revealed partly by the new nocmig technology. Aren’t birds brilliant? It’s almost time…
A friend recently sent me a link with the pithy note saying that he was surprised that I was such mates with Vladimir Putin and that he hoped I would use my best endeavours to get him to pull the tanks out of Ukraine. Of course, I’ll do all I can on that front but…
This paper is a mixture of the completely obvious and the quite important. It takes the oft-quoted suggestion by pro-grouse-shooting interests, that the only real alternative land uses to intensive driven grouse shooting are harmful agriculture and harmful afforestation, and says that isn’t true. It clearly isn’t, because what happens in terms of land use…