Yesterday I saw 75 species of birds at an RSPB nature reserve. But the species which will stick in my mind for longer were the harbour porpoises, adder and weasel. Q Where was I? A Yes, well done Doug, Bob, Stella and I guess Filbert! I’ve never seen harbour porpoise there before and there were…
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The rise of Newt-Kip
Nigel Farrage (or Smooth Newt-Kip as he is known to his follower) will be supping an extra pint of Old Peculiar after Newt-Kip’s astounding poll success. Instead of controlling Ramsey council and having no MPs Newt-Kip now controls Ramsey council and has no MPs. But you can’t get away from the fact that the coalition…
I hope they sink (V)
This is the fifth blog on the subject of Cambridge University Boat Club’s plans for a new boathouse (here, for new readers, are links to its forerunners; Blog 1, Blog 2, Blog 3, Blog 4). At the time of my previous blogs I had not seen the objections to the proposed development (which is much…
Read me
The April edition of Wild Travel (with a cute tree frog on the cover) will soon be replaced by the May one (with the rhinos (one of which is quite cute) on the cover). I really enjoy writing for Wild Travel as I get to write about biology without any politics in it, and, I…
Neonicotinoids – temporary ban
Owen Paterson must have been really hacked off by the vote in Europe yesterday to enforce a temporary ban on neonicotinoids. But at least it explains why some in his party think that we are going to be flooded with Romanians looking for jobs and benefits any time soon – we have a…
So what is Defra for, exactly…?
Owen Paterson is keen on showing people photographs of himself with dead squirrels and Richard Benyon is the richest MP in Parliament, but David Heath is completely invisible. That’s Defra for you. The last Labour government came to ‘power’ in 1997, and by autumn 2000 it had enacted the CROW Act which widened the right…
Re introduced species
I think this is a great cartoon by Ralph Underhill. A clever take on the word ‘introduced’ and great expressions on the faces of the grey and red squirrels. Rather bizarrely the CLA issued a press release at the beginning of this week supporting Owen Paterson’s culling of grey squirrels on his land. Well,…
Harrumph!
I see that an RSPB member of staff is talking at a League Against Cruel Sports event today. I’m not sure that’s a first, but it won’t have happened very often. This has been greeted with lots of harrumphing by those mild and consensual people in the Countryside Alliance who regard LACS as extremists. When…
Little owls on St George’s Day
The little owl is an introduced species in the UK but a common species just the other side of the English Channel. Little owls were successfully introduced into the UK at Lilford Hall by the 4th Baron Lilford in 1889; on St George’s Day, his gamekeeper found a little owl on a nest. Lilford Hall…
A natural debt
The first report of the Natural Capital Committee was published a while ago – it didn’t receive much attention in the media (here, here, here). Natural capital is the natural world. It is all that stuff that we inherited that we could pass on to future generations: fish in the sea, carbon in forests, reedbeds…