Yesterday I drove past Lilford Hall, up the road from where I live in east Northants, and thought, as I always do, of Little Owls. It was here that the first Little Owl nest in the UK was found in the grounds of Lilford Hall on St George’s Day 1889 after the bird was…
Category: ME:
This blog
Tomorrow morning I will post the 4,000th post on this blog in well under six years. If you’ve been with me since the first post, Don’t let them get away with this, 21 April 2011, then you have quite a lot of stamina. Thank you! There have been more than 3.8m pageviews in that time. …
Back to Bris
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I enjoyed attending the Bristol Ornithological Club’s 50th anniversary dinner last week. I gave a little speech and everyone thanked me, and I thanked them, and they thanked me, and I thanked them – it was a thankfest. We met in Bristol Zoo where the health and safety advice had the unusual twist of ‘…and…
John Muir
I was in Edinburgh over the weekend and took a trip out to Dunbar to see where John Muir grew up. The house with a very good display about his life and achievements used to be the grain store next to the house where he lived (which is big, and for sale if you fancy…
Delivery by DPD
Sometimes there are interesting things on one’s doorstep. I was taking a stroll to the postbox the other day when a flock of c25 Pied Wagtails flew over calling. It was nearly dusk and so I assumed that they were heading off to roost somewhere. I spent some time in the autumn searching unsuccessfully…
The Birds
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Do you ever listen to Book at Bedtime on Radio 4 between 1045pm and 11pm? I do, although the fact that it is around my bedtime usually means that I fall asleep before 11pm and get snatches of the story on a few nights a week! But it opens my ears, temporarily, to books that…
Unique and irreplaceable
Kempton Park racecourse is under threat and I’ve heard and read a lot about it in the last couple of days. I’m interested in Kempton racecourse as an example of a proposed development but also a little bit as a racecourse. Here is some of the coverage – mostly from horse racing sources to illustrate…
This blog in 2017
What does this blog have in store for 2017? an important part of Brexit discussions will be how and whether public money continues to be handed out to land managers – it’s our money and the public deserves a better return for its massive investment the best wildlife sites, on land and at sea, need…
Highlights from 2016
These are just a few image highlights from the pages of this blog from 2016. This Hoatzin image is by Oscar Dewhurst – 6 November One of Ralph’s best cartoons of the year – 21 May One of my favourite birds of the year: This was nice: And this: I saw a White-tailed…
This blog
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This blog has had over 1,250,000 page views in 2016 (as of yesterday – so only just!). Thank you to all contributors of Guest Blogs, cartoons, photographs and comments and to all readers for making this blog so successful. I’ll be giving you some thoughts for what 2017 may have in store in the New…