Note to self

A year ago I had a permanent job but after 25 years and one month at the RSPB (the best nature conservation organisation in the world), and after 12 and a half years of being its Conservation Director, I gave up a well paid and very satisfying job to explore new challenges. Was this really…

Fair enough Minister

On Monday I did an interview for the BBC Farming Today programme, with the NFU’s Guy Smith.  If you want to listen to that interview you can but you won’t learn anything new from it as the NFU is still in denial over the loss of farmland wildlife and the role that farming has played…

Pot pourri

It seems to have been raining  for two weeks – please stop.  I want to see some butterflies and more spring migrants. The summer of 1976 was a hot dry summer – and my gap year before university.  When a Drought Minister was appointed the heavens opened and my first month at Cambridge seemed to…

St Mark’s Day – 25 April

I’m no saint but it is St Mark’s Day. Keep an eye open for St Mark’s Flies – with their black hairy bodies and dangling legs – not like me at all. Although before we mucked about with the calendar this would have been around 4 May rather than now – but with global warming…

St George, Shakespeare and little owls

Today is St George’s Day and apparently Shakespeare’s birthday and the day he died too (how tidy!). It is also the day when little owls, an introduced species, were first proved to breed in the UK  – and that was in the county of Northants and just down the road from where I am writing. …