It’s surely worth pausing today, around 1730 UK time would be appropriate (1230 Ohio time), to remember that we drove the most numerous bird in the world, the Passenger Pigeon, to extinction exactly a century ago. Listen to, and watch, me being interviewed about Passenger Pigeons by Martha Kearny on the BBC World at One…
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Oscar Dewhurst – Kittiwakes
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Oscar writes: While I was at Minsmere the East Scrape was frequented by Kittiwakes. At one point one landed just behind another, before putting its head up between the tail feathers of the other. Nikon D800, Nikon 600mm f4 AFS-II
Sunday book review – A Sparrowhawk’s Lament by David Cobham
This review first appeared in the September Birdwatch and I am grateful to them for permission to reproduce it here (subscribe to Birdwatch here). This book is about the 15 species of raptor which breed in Britain – each gets a chapter. The author assesses whether their populations are doing well or badly (many, of…
Passenger Pigeon centenary looms
Here’s a piece by me in today’s Guardian about the extinction of the Passenger Pigeon. They slightly mangled the ending (Grrrr!) So here’s the original version of the penultimate paragraph. ‘And I can’t see that we would be worse off if the US had kept the Passenger Pigeon and more of its forests, and the…
Saturday cartoon by Ralph Underhill
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When a butterfly flaps its wings…
In a way, this post follows on from Pip Howard’s Guest Blog this morning about once-alive invertebrates encased in perspex, except this post concerns actually-alive butterflies sold as extras for celebrations such as weddings etc. A reader of this blog alerted me to this and wrote that ‘I was at a wedding recently and was…
Guest Blog – Real life bugs or a living planet? – by Pip Howard
Pip Howard is a British forester who lives and works in France. He worked with Save Our Woods and now at Forestcomms working on the pan European landscape research project HERCULES. Do Children Really Want Real Life Bugs or a Living Planet? All discussion on the environment will at some point, quite rightly, centre…
Nice and old-fashioned?
Ten days ago or so, I joined the Hawk and Owl Trust at the Bird Fair, and a while later an envelope full of interesting information arrived as a consequence of my membership. It included a car sticker, a membership card and badge. These things made me quite nostalgic. I can remember my kestrel-shaped YOC…
A late Swift
Yesterday morning, a Swift flew over the garden and put a smile on my face. It’s so difficult to know when you see your last bird of a particular species for the year (at the time) as there is always the possibility of seeing another a little later. My first Swift of the year is…
An extra pair of binoculars
I have bought an extra pair of binoculars and I’ve been trying them out. They are Pentax Papilio 8.5×25 Close Focus binoculars. As a birder, they look very twee and naff to me – not something you’d want to be seen staring through on the East Bank at Cley, on Tresco or getting off the…