The Hen Harrier in the room

We must congratulate Princes Charles and William for speaking out against the illegal killing which is driving the African elephant closer to extinction. Channel 4 (and the RSPB) made the point that there is plenty of illegal destruction of wildlife here at home too.  Some of it in the part of Scotland where Prince William…

Readers’ survey – the politics of it all.

Four out of five respondents to the readers’ survey said that they would vote Labour rather than Conservative if the general election took place tomorrow.  Don’t worry – it isn’t happening tomorrow. [Click here, here and here for other results from this survey] There were over 600 of you who I will describe as ‘Labour’…

What do you think? More results from readers’ survey.

Readers of this blog are generally satisfied with the performance of wildlife NGOs – I think you are all just a little too generous. However, although there is a clear majority who disagree with the idea that there are too many NGOs, a large minority – 43% of respondents – believe that we have too…

Sanctuary – it’s a Lottery

I’ve never bought a Lottery ticket in my life. It’s not that I don’t believe in gambling, but I take it seriously, which means I would never bet on a game of chance where the expected returns are 50p in the pound.  Duhh! And it’s not that I don’t believe in giving money to charity…

Signs of spring and a scary encounter

I’ve made it out a few times recently but I only got a little bit further than this at Stanwick Lakes the other day before the water was too deep for wellies. It hasn’t felt much like spring to me, but some of the birds seem to believe it is.  Great Tits are in full…

I blame the Environment Agency

It’s raining – I blame the Environment Agency. And while we are at it, I blame them for the extinction of the Passenger Pigeon, toothache, late buses, cancer, the Great Fire of London, Eric Pickles, Maradona’s ‘Hand of God’ goal, the Countryside Alliance, potholes, Judas Iscariot, the wreck of the Torrey Canyon, plagues of locusts,…

Who are you? More results from the readers’ survey.

The responses to the readers’ survey (854 of them, although not everyone answered every question) suggest that readers of this blog are not hopeful about the state of British wildlife, think the coalition government is doing a bad or very bad job for the environment and claim that this will influence how they vote. Last…

Who you are? First results of readers’ survey

Here are the first results from the survey of readers (carried out between Saturday and Thursday).  I closed the survey at 854 responses as that was twice the number of respondents when the same questions were asked in December 2012  (and was arrived at in a shorter period of time).  Last month (January 2014) this…

Who will be leading the NFU? and Dredging the depths

Two weeks tomorrow will see the election of a new NFU hierarchy of President, Vice President and Deputy President. The candidates for the NFU posts are as follows and you can see what they say about themselves by following the links (and their Twitter accounts).  Not much about the environment is there – from the…