I’m off to Cheltenham tomorrow for the first of four days racing at the Cheltenham Festival. Despite the deluges of much of the winter the ground has been drying out, as it always does these days at Cheltenham, and the going will probably be just on the soft side of good. But we’ll see how…
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A taste of orange
Apparently we didn’t have a name for the colour orange in English until we discovered oranges around 1512. I wonder whether that is right. This reminds me of my time at school where my Latin master told us all that oranges used to be called noranges but we English found that saying ‘a norange’ was…
English SSSIs
The government aims for the proportion of SSSIs that are in favourable condition to be over 50% by 2020. Year ending March 2011 – 36.7% in favourable condition Year ending March 2012 – 37.4% in favourable condition Year ending March 2013 – 37.5% in favourable condition That doesn’t look like a trajectory that is going…
Did you see Elmley on Countryfile yesterday evening?
Philip Merricks has done a very good job, on the whole, at Elmley NNR. It looked jolly wet on the TV last night didn’t it? Let’s hope lots of Lapwings and Redshank will be nesting successfully there this spring as usual. You have to go back as far as 28 April 1987 to find this…
Thank you BTO, Berks and Oxon
Saturday was a very enjoyable day. I attended a BTO conference for the Berkshire and Oxfordshire region (at Benson just south of Oxford). It seemed the right place to be as the first talk was given by Ian Newton (whose latest excellent book was reviewed here), another talk was about the birds of the ‘heart…
The new Clint Eastwood film
The NFU elections provided us with a the possibility of a new Clint Eastwood film but whether it is a remake of the Good, the Bad and the Ugly, or the Good, the Good and the Good, or simply the Bad, the Bad and the Bad remains to be seen. I will try, very hard,…
Driving around in black and white
There was nothing wrong with the Darlington Premier Inn, although I won’t be rushing back there for the ambience and atmosphere. However, driving through the Pennine snow before dawn was more of an adventure. Sitting drinking coffee from a vacuum flask while watching three blackcock displaying was a delight. The males strutted with their…
Not the worst thing ever? But surely not the best.
There was a lot of discussion about the EA dropping their biodiversity role because of cuts last week. Everyone squealed (see here and here) that this was a bad thing – as they were meant to do because that makes the cuts more difficult. I’m not so sure. I’ve never really thought that the EA…
What do these two species have in common – perhaps?
Sunday was a lovely day – it didn’t rain and it didn’t blow a gale and the sun shone. Hooray! I was in Norfolk and saw the odd bird or two and it felt like we were coming towards the end of winter because I also saw… Carpets of snowdrops. I like snowdrops – don’t…
Save me from local solutions
As I wrote some time ago, ‘there is no way to get rid of water, only to slow down its inevitable passage to the sea or speed it up’. And if I want to get rid of the water from my land it has to go somewhere. If I build a flood defence around my…