I’m accused of various things, mostly by people who don’t know me, but a really good thing about writing a blog and writing articles, and writing books, is that my words are there, out in the open for anyone to read. So you can make your own minds up. About 100,000 of those words, on…
Category: AUTHOR: Reflections, Inglorious, Message from Martha, Remarkable Birds etc
This brought a tear to my eye
Hi Mark, I have just read your recent blog on the Peak District and the National Trust, and I am afraid it has made me cry. I think they are partly tears of sorrow and partly of hope against hope that what you write about could be true. I love the Peak District. It is…
Cry God for Henry, England and St George!
Yesterday was, of course, St George’s Day, Shakespeare’s birthday and Shakespeare’s death day too. So what would be more appropriate than the quote above? Henry, and a group of close friends, gathered in the Peak District to celebrate the day, the achievement of 30,000 signatures for our e-petition to ban driven grouse shooting, and the…
Newsletters
Do you have a newsletter that would publish an article on driven grouse shooting before 20 September? Perhaps a Bird Club? A Natural History Society? A WI group? Whatever… I’d be happy to provide something in order to spread the word. What I need from you is: a deadline a word limit information about the…
Looking forward to be at Housmans tomorrow evening
Housmans Bookshop describes itself as London’s premier radical bookshop and so I’m expecting to feel at home when I talk there tomorrow evening about why we should ban driven grouse shooting. 7pm, 5 Caledonian Road and entrance is £3 (redeemable against any purchases). And maybe we’ll get some new signatures on our e-petition to ban…
24 March 1900
On this day in 1900, the last wild Passenger Pigeon (perhaps) was shot in Ohio. It ended up in the Columbus Ohio History Center where it is still on display – and goes by the name of Buttons because when first stuffed, buttons were used for its eyes. Here are some lightly edited extracts from…
Very pleased to be second
I’ve got a lovely certificate to hang on the office wall: Inglorious was the second choice in the BB/BTO Best Bird Book of the Year for 2015. Woohoo! I notice that the judges say ‘Not all will agree with the conclusion…’, although my thought is ‘give it time and they will!’, but I was, of…
Review of Inglorious from the USA
I’ve had a few conversations with American friends about grouse shooting and several have started with the American being sympathetic to grouse ‘hunting’ and them ending up saying ‘but that’s not hunting at all’. Correct! Driven grouse shooting is the most unsporting of sports and is akin to a computer game where one blasts away…
Looking forward to talking!
I have a few gigs on over the next couple of weeks; On Wednesday (20 Jan) I am talking to what will probably be mostly a bunch of undergraduates in Cambridge – the Cambridge Nature Society – in the new David Attenborough Building, Room 1.25 A+B at 7pm (about life in general and driven grouse…
Another reader’s letter
‘Hello Mark, I have just finished reading your absolutely fantastic book Inglorious, I bought the book on Chris Packham’s recommendation. It’s a long time since a book has made me quite so positively angry, I think Gabrielle Palmer’s The Politics of Breastfeeding has been the only other book to make me feel like this. I…