Norman Moore is 90 today – Happy Birthday! Norman Moore has played a major role in nature conservation thinking and practice and his influence still endures. His work on heathlands, hedges, dragonflies, and much more, is still widely quoted. Norman is credited with coining the term ‘a birdwatcher’s insect’ for dragonflies. Norman is the last…
BLOG POSTS
Cartoon by Ralph Underhill
I am much more likely to see a fox when I spend the night in London than I am around my own rural home. I remember seeing two London foxes in a car park one evening and I watched them for a good few minutes because they were so close, so tame and so…
Leave the krill for the whales
Did you see Hugh’s Fish Fight last night? I don’t always watch it but I did yesterday as I saw it was about South Georgia and that’s been a subject which I have covered in this blog (here and here). South Georgia is a long way away from here but is a UK Overseas Territory…
Quiz answers
Here are the answers to today’s quiz. 1. Which bird species has the largest UK breeding population? Wren 8,600,000 pairs. 2. How many UK breeding bird species have populations of over 1 million pairs? I think there are 21; pheasant, wood pigeon, jackdaw, carrion crow, blue tit, great tit, skylark, chiffchaff, willow warbler, blackcap,…
Quiz
Here’s a quiz – and it’s just for fun. The answers will be posted at 7pm this evening. If you have the February issue of British Birds (with a dipper on the cover) you can look up most of the answers in the excellent article on population estimates of birds in the UK. 1. Which…
Guest blog – The flight of the neonicotinoids by Matt Shardlow
Matt Shardlow is the Chief Executive of the Invertebrate Conservation Trust Buglife. Buglife is the only organisation in Europe committed to saving all invertebrates; the charity has twenty four members of staff and a growing portfolio of conservation projects. The charity’s priorities include the sustainable management of brownfield sites; saving endangered Biodiversity Action Plan Priority…
Conservatives in Defra – not doing too well really
I can’t find the Conservative manifesto from the 2010 General Election online but I have my copy to hand. Here are some quotes from pages 95-97 with my assessment of how Defra has performed in nearly three years of being in ‘power’. ‘The most pressing animal health problem in the UK today is bovine tuberculosis…
Moths – a bit more than just bird food?
I always look forward to reports from Butterfly Conservation – not because they are always full of good news but because they are always very professionally produced, always teach me something I didn’t know and always have the mixture of graphs, images and words that does it for me. Their latest report ‘The State of…
Horse meat, Romania, vultures, Oscar Whisky, Owen Paterson and your taxes – all connected.
The connectedness of the world intrigues me. I like making connections between facts, people, events, ideas. I’m getting a bit tired of hearing about the ‘horse meat crisis’ (eg here, here, here, here, here) only because it certainly isn’t a crisis when safe delicious horse meat is incorporated alongside safe delicious cow meat in our…
Real men (and women) recycle
“I haven’t seen anything like this before” said a scientist, but then maybe he doesn’t get out much… “They do have very very complicated biology” said a scientist. A sea slug that is able to detach, re-grow and then re-use its penis has surprised scientists.