I was standing in the garden one day last week when I saw a feather falling to the ground. It fell slowly as you would expect – it floated to the ground in next door’s garden. It took around four seconds to cover the distance from the the height of the top of a nearby…
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Just crumbs
I was pleased to see that there is some evidence, from the BTO, that the decline of urban House Sparrows has stopped, paused or slowed. Let’s hope that the House Sparrow is on the up again. This is what I wrote about it for The Independent.
Blackberry makes $1bn loss!
Blackberries are quite late in ripening this year. But with a little effort, you can still pick an ice-cream container full in half an hour. And they still taste yummy in blackberry and apple pie. What’s all the fuss about? …
Four questions on extinction
Blue Whale: “Mike” Michael L. Baird CC-BY-2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0) via Wikimedia Commons Smallpox Virus: PhD Dre at en.wikipedia [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html) (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)] via Wikimedia Commons Parachute Spider: Zoological Survey of India CC-BY- SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses /by-sa/3.0) via Wikimedia Commons This is just for…
Sunday Book Review – The World’s Rarest Birds by Erik Hirschfeld, Andy Swash and Robert Still
This book is actually about threatened birds rather than rare birds – it deals with those 197 species which are regarded as Critically Endangered and those 389 which are Endangered. Having said that, many of these species are very rare. For example, there are (or were) 27 Sulu Hornbills in the world (on three islands…
Saturday cartoon by Ralph Underhill
National Trust – looking good!
The National Trust has just issued a press release on its plans for the High Peak Moors. This has been a subject of concern and hope on this blog for quite some time (see here, here, here, here, and here). The text of the press release is reproduced below (with some good bits highlighted by…
NGO Watch
Have you noticed a breeze of change blowing through the NGO world? At Plantlife, their much-loved Chief Executive, Victoria Chester, is moving on to a higher vocation and so they are looking for a new leader. The Freshwater Habitats Trust has emerged, like a dragonfly, from the waters of Pond Conservation –…
You readers
This rather wiggly table (sorry about that – I’ve spent ages trying to get it to look perfect and failed!) shows you the number of unique visitors to this website in each of the last 12 months and in August 2012 and 2011 (for comparison). VISITORS AUG 2011 1918 AUG 2012 4909 SEP 5816 OCT 7179 NOV 7660 DEC 8123…
British farming is failing
This week is Red Tractor Week – the red tractor logo belongs in a museum! The Red Tractor logo promises that it is ‘the symbol for quality food that you can trust‘. Despite Alex James and Adam Henson wanting us to ‘buy’ the tractor logo I’m afraid I don’t. I had a look at the…