Standing up for Nature
I enjoyed speaking to the Oxford Ornithological Society on Wednesday evening – a good turn out and lots of good questions. Tomorrow it’s the Bournemouth Natural Science Society – 39 Christchurch Road, Bournemouth, BH1 3NS at 14:30 – on the subject of Passenger Pigeons. Next week I am in Edinburgh on Tuesday evening and in…
The following is a write-up, a personal one, that I did for Plantlife, the Wildlife Trusts and the Rare Breeds Survival Trust of a meeting to discuss meadow conservation which was held on 18 July this year. ’When people come to Highgrove and see the flower meadow there they often say that it reminds…
If we ate more of what we grow we could feed another 4 billion people – which would go a long way, in the short term to deal with global food poverty. Many of these gains would be achieved in a few countries. The major gains would be from eating less meat (and more plant…
Last week I was early, I’m always early, for my interview with Martha Kearney on the World at One and so I watched a protest march set off from outside the BBC near Oxford Circus. There were firefighters and teachers from the NUT. I recognised the strains of Billy Bragg’s rendition of The Internationale playing…
I did the second visit to ‘my’ Wildflowers Count survey square recently. It was a nice walk on a hot sunny day with a pub at the far side of the square – what’s not to like about that? I am now much better acquainted with black horehound and marsh woundwort than previously. Because this…
A couple of weeks’ ago I attended a conference in Cambridge of the Cambridge Conservation Forum. It was really quite interesting, but as with many conferences, the details are fading into the mush of my mind. That’s not to say it wasn’t a good conference – I enjoyed it a lot. I’m not going to…
I had a listen to the programme of Shared Planet, of which I was a small part, after watching the end of Brazil v Mexico which I just caught after getting back from lunch and dinner with friends in London. Not bad – a couple of bits I was keen that they should make the…
I’m really quite fond of my Breeding Bird Survey square (I have two but there is one that I think of as ‘mine’ more than the other). It really doesn’t photograph that well – being a bog-standard bit of arable farmland – but still, I am fond of it. On Sunday morning I made my…
My first blog of the day is posted at 6am, so when I started producing a second blog each day, 6pm seemed to have a certain symmetry about it. I definitely use this second blog of the day in a slightly different way – it’s usually less contentious, less hard-hitting and sometimes produces updates etc…
The Chequered Skipper is perhaps the British butterfly with the least expected UK range. Given that this butterfly is found over much of Europe where would you expect its UK range to be centred? Just over the Channel in southeast England? Maybe the New Forest or Dorset heaths? Think again! The Chequered Skipper is found…