Nice farmers – make your choice

It’s time to vote in the Nature of Farming award which is the UK’s biggest farm wildlife award. Last year 22,000 of us voted to choose the winner from four finalists chosen by experts. The award is sponsored by the Daily Telegraph and the EU Life+ Programme and is a partnership between the RSPB, Plantlife…

The milk of human kindness

There’s been a lot in the news about the price of milk recently because of the low prices that some farmers are receiving for their produce (see here, here and here for example). I still have a milkman who delivers (quite expensive) milk to the door several times a week but I am glad to…

What a lark

On Saturday morning I was listening to Saturday Live on Radio 4 and a piece about punting in Cambridge.  Now I’ve done my share of punting, in the rather distant past, but the sound of the skylark was not a common accompaniment to those trips though it did feature in the radio programme’s soundtrack. It…

Bring in the bunting…

In amidst all that buzzard-bothering nonsense of the last couple of weeks an important restatement of the absolutely obvious was made: farmland birds have declined steeply and there is no obvious redemption in sight. The most recent science on the subject was a report produced from national bird monitoring schemes across Europe, including the UK,…

A song for Guy

Guy Smith, NFU environment spokesperson asked for the details of species I saw on my BBS visit.  I wonder why. I’ll do better than that Guy, I’ll list the species seen on my visit last Saturday and compare them with those seen on my first visit to this BBS square almost exactly seven years ago…