Category: BLOGS by guest authors

I am a final-year DPhil student with the Ruaha Carnivore Project and the Wildlife Conservation Research Unit (WildCRU), at the University of Oxford. I specialise on large African carnivore research and conservation, and have worked on this in Mozambique, Malawi and Tanzania. For my DPhil research I am investigating the status and special ecology of,…

It’s October, so my thoughts inevitably turn to the woods. Its time to start the coppice cycle again, and this year it’s a little more interesting. Coppicing is the cyclical cutting down of tree growth in deciduous woodlands, usually lowland ones in England or Wales. It has been documented as happening since Domesday Book times,…

Mark’s blogs on Blackberrying (see here and here) triggered me to put down a few thoughts. I am a blackberry-er.  In fact, I’m probably a downright scrumper and forager of all sorts. I have never seen it as that, I have always seen it as utilising part of a wild food resource. Going berry-ing was…

Jack Riggall is an independent hunt monitor and anti-hunting campaigner. He wrote a previous guest blog here, FC and Hunts, in February 2019. The Forestry Commission recently announced, on Thursday 5th September, that they are changing their policy of licensing fox hunts and will begin publishing the dates of hunting meets as well as introducing…