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,…
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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…
Questions. Questions! Questions?
There are, aren’t there, many types of questions? Rhetorical questions, leading questions, straight questions, difficult questions. Latin, I dimly remember from school, had particular ways of asking questions to which the expected answer was ‘yes’ and other ways of asking if the expected answer were ‘no’. I’m quite a questioning person myself. ‘Why is the…
Carbon lady 2
I was really surprised to come across these words of Mrs Thatcher: “We must remember our duty to Nature before it is too late. That duty is constant. It is never completed. It lives on as we breathe. It endures as we eat and sleep, work and rest, as we are born and as we…
The carbon lady
Say what you like about Baroness Thatcher (and I’m sure you will) but she was arguably the first UK Prime Minister to ‘get’ climate change. Arguably in fact, she may have been almost the only UK Prime Minister to ‘get’ climate change. But there is a smidgeon of evidence that Enoch Powell was right to…
Do you tweet?
Here’s a list of nature conservation organisations with their number of followers on Twitter. To be fair, many of the organisations have several (many) Twitter accounts for particular sites or particular subjects, but those listed here are the ‘main’, and sometimes the only, Twitter accounts for these organisations. @nationaltrust 144,824 @natures_voice (RSPB) 52,785 @WoodlandTrust…
Good luck looking for signs of spring
I’ve now heard my first chiffchaff and seen a common tern too (both on Friday). This weekend should deliver lots of migrants – I hope! The cuckoos are coming with Scottish Chance on the right side of the Sahara, English Chris is keen as mustard near Dijon although the Welsh David and Lloyd are still…
Lydd – bad news
Earlier today the Secretaries of State for Local Government and Transport approved the planning application for an airport at Lydd. The Secretaries of the State have found that there is development plan support for the proposals from LP policy TR15 and that, in an area where the prospects of significant regeneration remain precarious, the proposals…