Standing up for Nature
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 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…
‘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…
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…
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…
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,…
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%…
It’s been a slightly odd day. I woke very early (even for me) and so had a little snooze mid-morning, listened to the Budget on the radio and then went for a walk at Stanwick Lakes. As I walked around in the afternoon sunshine I was thinking that, in some ways, I was quite impressed…
BirdLife International has a number of fundraising ‘asks’ on the Just Giving site. All are worth supporting. There are several teams who are fundraising by competing in the Champions of the Flyway bird race at the Eilat Birds Festival in Israel. This raises the inevitable question of ‘why fly to Israel to raise money…