If you track back to 2 April on this blog you will find that I made Freedom of Information Act and Environmental Information Regulation requests to Defra and Natural England. Defra failed to respond to those requests until sending me a letter dated 4 May saying that they needed another 20 working days to respond. …
BLOG POSTS
No worries, mate! Australia grabs headlines over marine reserves and UK says nothing.
I’m a bit surprised that we haven’t heard any great announcement from the UK ahead of the Rio conference. Often good news stories are squirrelled away to be produced (to mix analogies) like rabbits out of hats for maximum effect. This must have been what the Australian government had in mind when making a recent…
Going cuckoo – or gone cuckoo?
We are within days of the summer solstice and I haven’t had my spring yet! There’s plenty of time for there to be a baking hot summer but I am not necessarily expecting it. And it’s turning out to be a funny old spring/summer. For a start, England have played two games of football and…
Road to Rio+20 and road to Euro 2012
Over the last few weeks, and into next week, I have been a guest blogger on the RSPB website; blogging about the Rio+20 conference from a variety of perspectives. And yesterday, the RSPB got a much more eminent guest blogger to chip in – Deputy PM Nick Clegg who is going to the Rio conference. …
Book review – Silent Spring revisited by Conor Mark Jameson
You may have noticed that I have been blogging on the RSPB website since 1 June – in the run up to the Rio+20 conference of world ‘leaders’ which starts next week. My blog for the RSPB today is about the widespread use of ‘-cides’ – chemical poisons. Rachel Carson’s book, Silent Spring, was published…
Swift
The BTO keeps doing amazing things these days. In my copy of BTO News there is an article on swift migration. Through putting geolocators on swifts – and rather critically taking them off again a year later – the details of the swifts’ movements in Africa are revealed. And they are fascinating. The picture on…
Book Review – I love my World by Chris Holland
This book describes itself as ‘the playful, hands-on, nature connection guidebook’ – and so it is. If you spend any time with children out of doors then this book will give you lots of ideas for games, activities and things to talk about with young people. And those young people could be of any age…
Wuthering Moors 18 – your help needed please
For new readers – put ‘Wuthering’ into the search facility on this blog to catch up. However, in short: Natural England were quite a long way down the line in prosecuting an upland landowner for alleged offences in connection with moorland management when it suddenly stopped all action and reached an agreement with the estate….
Guest blog – Save our verges by Sarah Pettegree
Sarah Pettegree has lived most of her life in Norfolk and owns the award winning Bray’s Cottage Pork Pies, which was named one of the top 100 social brands in 2011. That means she tweets quite a lot. http://www.perfectpie.co.uk/ I live in a perfectly beautiful part of North Norfolk. Most of my journeys are…
Five short jobs, since it’s quite likely to be raining
1. Support Plantlife’s campaign to make verge-cutting ecologically literate. Have a look at these photographs from Nigel and Lois Harbron of a small patch of what is essentially a flower meadow which poses no threat to road safety and is bureaucratically scalped every year. 2. Spend two minutes to get a bank to give $5…