The Lead Ammunition Group was set up in April 2010 and has made pitifully slow progress. The latest minutes of the group include this short statement: ‘The group received a presentation by Dr Ruth Cromie on the WWT Wildlife Health Unit compliance monitoring investigation and perceived barriers to behaviour change. The study results suggest that…
BLOG POSTS
Rams rampant now
Derby County FC had a variable March. The month started (1st March) with a disappointing but perhaps not wholly unexpected away loss to Burnley but the home defeat (8th March) by lowly Millwall was definitely a grave disappointment. The home draw with Bolton on the 11th wasn’t such a great result but an away draw…
This day in 1900
Comments Off on This day in 1900
In his book, Hope is the Thing with Feathers, Chris Cokinos describes the death of what may have been the last wild Passenger Pigeon at the hands of the young Press Clay Southworth in rural Ohio. That was on 24 March 1900 – after that, the only Passenger Pigeons known to man (and woman) were…
Oscar Dewhurst – Manx Shearwater
Oscar writes: When I was on Skomer, off the cost of Pembrokeshire, I was very surprised to see this Manx Shearwater perched on a stone wall during the middle of the day. They are nocturnal birds that breed on the island, but I was very glad to have the opportunity to see one in…
Sunday Book Review – The Global Pigeon by Colin Jerolmark
‘I never paid much attention to pigeons until one defecated on me’ is not a bad opening line for a book. This book is about the interaction between pigeons and people – which of the two gets more defecated upon? Domesticated pigeons, and urban feral pigeons, are derived from the Rock Dove but are normally…
Saturday cartoon by Ralph Underhill
Last day of…
If today is the first day of spring, then yesterday must have been the last day of winter. I spent the evening of the last day of winter giving a talk to my local mid-Nene RSPB group – as a stand-in for a much better speaker, Ian Newton, who had lost his voice. There were…
Labour – hopeless on the natural environment
I received an email from Angela Eagle over 10 days ago, as a Labour Party member, excitedly telling me that the party had published eight policy papers ‘that will provide the foundation of our One Nation manifesto’. I have until 13 June to respond and ‘make sure Labour’s election manifesto reflects your views, beliefs and…
More bits and pieces
I wrote in June about a day I spent being shown butterflies in San Francisco by Liam O’Brien. Liam showed me the last site of the now-extinct Xerces Blue butterfly and now sends me this image of a memorial which has suddenly appeared. The Moorland Association, having met Lord de Mauley to bend his ear,…
Vultures and diclofenac
The story about diclofenac and vulture declines is an amazing one. And it is developing a nasty new twist. Asian vultures crashed in numbers very rapidly. In the 1980s the Indian White-rumped Vulture was probably the commonest bird of prey in the world but its numbers (and those of other species) fell by around 99.9%…