Early Day Motion 603, which calls on the Home Office to stump up its share of the cost of the National Wildlife Crime Unit has attracted six new signatures from MPs in the last week and has now reached 114 signatures. It is now the 8th-most-signed EDM of this session of Parliament (and has risen…
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Severn Barrage
The Severn Estuary has the second largest tidal reach in the world. The gravitational pull of the moon causes huge amounts of water to flow in and out of the estuary twice a day. If only we could tap that power in some way… Tidal power is infinitely renewable. It’s a bit like wind…
Talking
I’m looking forward to talking to the Cambridgeshire Bird Club this evening. Don’t go to St John’s College – lovely place, but not where I am speaking (click here for location). And if you’d like a signed copy of Fighting for Birds then I’ll be happy to sell you one for 1p less than 13…
Maybe not the biggest surprise ever…
Yesterday’s Today programme (at around 0639 and 0812) disclosed that high lead levels can make us more aggressive. We know that ‘Lead damages the brain’ and ‘this is why there is a drive to keep lead levels very low and to keep lead levels in children particularly low’. Hmmm. Makes you wonder doesn’t it? Another…
I’m looking forward to this…
The second installment of the new BBC1 wildlife series on Africa is this evening at 9pm. Was it just me who found the first episode amazing, enchanting, uplifting and intriguing? Fighting giraffes, cunning little drongos, rhinos at night, leopards up trees, ostriches and more and more and more. I watched some of the repeat on…
Early Day Motion 603 – please help protect the National Wildlife Crime Unit
Red kites are ‘eating up lots of larks’ according to ‘real countryman’ Clive Aslet and our species has to intervene. But at least the Countryside Alliance admits, when faced with the evidence of an almost complete lack of breeding hen harriers in England, and Bowland Betty’s shooting in northern England, that the odd case of…
Parked at the ‘mid-term’ with no sign of any LibDem drive
The coalition mid-term review hardly mentions the environment in any meaningful way. There are a few poor jokes – the two mentions of ‘greenest government ever’, the promise to protect the marine environment with protected areas, the continuing obsession with a badger cull rather than control of bovine TB and closing an ash door after…
Early week and Early Day motion 603
Early Day Motions are a way of raising an issue in Parliament. MPs write a few words about an issue and then other concerned MPs can add their names to demonstrate support. If an EDM gets a lot of support, particularly cross-party support, then the issue tends to be taken a little more seriously than…
Problem with site corrected – I believe
If you have visited my website recently and encountered some information about V****a on it then I’m sorry about that but the site was temporarily hacked. I don’t think this lasted for more than a few hours, and I know that only a small number of users during the relevant period even noticed it (I…
Waxwings near me
I popped out one afternoon last week to visit an industrial estate. A birder going to an industrial estate in January is most likely to mean ‘waxwings’. And that is what it meant on this occasion. Waxwings has been reported from the Burton Latimer/Barton Seagrave area over the previous few days and when I had…