Happy Birthday Norman Moore – and some snippets

Norman Moore is 90 today – Happy Birthday! Norman Moore has played a major role in nature conservation thinking and practice and his influence still endures.  His work on heathlands, hedges, dragonflies, and much more, is still widely quoted.  Norman is credited with coining the term ‘a birdwatcher’s insect’ for dragonflies.  Norman is the last…

Cartoon by Ralph Underhill

  I am much more likely to see a fox when I spend the night in London than I am around my own rural home.  I remember seeing two London foxes in a car park one evening and I watched them for a good few minutes because they were so close, so tame and so…

Leave the krill for the whales

Did you see Hugh’s Fish Fight last night? I don’t always watch it but I did yesterday as I saw it was about South Georgia and that’s been a subject which I have covered in this blog (here and here). South Georgia is a long way away from here but is a UK Overseas Territory…

Quiz answers

Here are the answers to today’s quiz.   1. Which bird species has the largest UK breeding population? Wren 8,600,000 pairs. 2. How many UK breeding bird species have populations of over 1 million pairs?  I think there are 21; pheasant, wood pigeon, jackdaw, carrion crow, blue tit, great tit, skylark, chiffchaff, willow warbler, blackcap,…

Quiz

Here’s a quiz – and it’s just for fun.  The answers will be posted at 7pm this evening. If you have the February issue of British Birds (with a dipper on the cover) you can look up most of the answers in the excellent article on population estimates of birds in the UK. 1. Which…