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…
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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…
Carbon lady 2
I was really surprised to come across these words of Mrs Thatcher: “We must remember our duty to Nature before it is too late. That duty is constant. It is never completed. It lives on as we breathe. It endures as we eat and sleep, work and rest, as we are born and as we…
The carbon lady
Say what you like about Baroness Thatcher (and I’m sure you will) but she was arguably the first UK Prime Minister to ‘get’ climate change. Arguably in fact, she may have been almost the only UK Prime Minister to ‘get’ climate change. But there is a smidgeon of evidence that Enoch Powell was right to…
Guest Blog – You can be a member of the RSPB & a gamekeeper by Rob Yorke
Rob Yorke is a countryman with two hats: one as a chartered surveyor paying his mortgage, the other as a rural commentator passionate about an informed countryside debate. He has lived in west Scotland, north England, London and now permanently in south Wales. He stalks The Times’ letter pages but it’s cheaper to follow him…
Do you tweet?
Here’s a list of nature conservation organisations with their number of followers on Twitter. To be fair, many of the organisations have several (many) Twitter accounts for particular sites or particular subjects, but those listed here are the ‘main’, and sometimes the only, Twitter accounts for these organisations. @nationaltrust 144,824 @natures_voice (RSPB) 52,785 @WoodlandTrust…