My main task between now and the end of September is to finish writing a book ‘on’ the passenger pigeon for Bloomsbury – and for me and for you! 1 September 2014 will mark the centenary of the extinction of this bird – probably the most numerous bird in the world a few decades before…
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Re introduced species
I think this is a great cartoon by Ralph Underhill. A clever take on the word ‘introduced’ and great expressions on the faces of the grey and red squirrels. Rather bizarrely the CLA issued a press release at the beginning of this week supporting Owen Paterson’s culling of grey squirrels on his land. Well,…
Butterflies
2012 was a terrible year for butterflies according to Butterfly Conservation – and they would know! Almost every species had a bad year with many having year-on-year declines of well over 50%. You can see why George Osborne might be sceptical about using natural capital in national accounts if a bit of grotty weather can…
Harrumph!
I see that an RSPB member of staff is talking at a League Against Cruel Sports event today. I’m not sure that’s a first, but it won’t have happened very often. This has been greeted with lots of harrumphing by those mild and consensual people in the Countryside Alliance who regard LACS as extremists. When…
Sublime
I failed completely in January and March but I hit the target in February and April. On Friday evening I visited Glapthorn Cow Pasture for my annual search for nightingales. They are pretty reliable, and there had been one reported a couple of days before, so although it was at the early end of arrival…
Little owls on St George’s Day
The little owl is an introduced species in the UK but a common species just the other side of the English Channel. Little owls were successfully introduced into the UK at Lilford Hall by the 4th Baron Lilford in 1889; on St George’s Day, his gamekeeper found a little owl on a nest. Lilford Hall…
A natural debt
The first report of the Natural Capital Committee was published a while ago – it didn’t receive much attention in the media (here, here, here). Natural capital is the natural world. It is all that stuff that we inherited that we could pass on to future generations: fish in the sea, carbon in forests, reedbeds…
Round up – but not Monsanto’s
Big beach clean up – the Marine Conservation Society are having a Big Beach Clean Up next week. I’ll be fighting litter on the beaches of Northants, don’t you worry! Pond conservation – I’ve heard lots of people saying that the cold weather has affected the laying of frogs and toads in their ponds. I…
Cartoon by Ralph Underhill
Questions. Questions! Questions?
There are, aren’t there, many types of questions? Rhetorical questions, leading questions, straight questions, difficult questions. Latin, I dimly remember from school, had particular ways of asking questions to which the expected answer was ‘yes’ and other ways of asking if the expected answer were ‘no’. I’m quite a questioning person myself. ‘Why is the…