We (and I am talking England here) don’t have a vermin list. I’m glad about that. Whenever I hear someone talking about vermin it makes my metaphorical hackles rise. Why should we regard any species that has evolved on this planet as being a problem? Yes, individuals of species can cause us problems but it…
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Cheltenham preview for Day 3
Most people regard this as the least interesting day of the Festival – they are wrong. The Ryanair Chase is one of the best races of the four days and the World Hurdle is another. The Ryanair is run over that ‘funny’ distance of 2.5 miles – a bit far for some of the quick…
Cheltenham preview for Day 2
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Day 2 is usually my favourite day but I’m not sure that will be the case this year. The ‘big’ race, the Champion Chase, doesn’t quicken the pulse in its usual manner this year. It’s not because Sprinter Sacre, the reigning champion is missing through injury (if that’s the right thing to call a heart…
Past and future defence
The whole purpose of the Monday of Cheltenham week is to free one’s mind from real life and to concentrate on the total irrelevance of horses running around in circles (in the case of Cheltenham, anti-clockwise circles). So with this in mind I went for a walk early on Monday morning to relax and let…
Cheltenham preview for Day 1
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…
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,…