The second installment of the new BBC1 wildlife series on Africa is this evening at 9pm. Was it just me who found the first episode amazing, enchanting, uplifting and intriguing? Fighting giraffes, cunning little drongos, rhinos at night, leopards up trees, ostriches and more and more and more. I watched some of the repeat on…
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Early Day Motion 603 – please help protect the National Wildlife Crime Unit
Red kites are ‘eating up lots of larks’ according to ‘real countryman’ Clive Aslet and our species has to intervene. But at least the Countryside Alliance admits, when faced with the evidence of an almost complete lack of breeding hen harriers in England, and Bowland Betty’s shooting in northern England, that the odd case of…
Parked at the ‘mid-term’ with no sign of any LibDem drive
The coalition mid-term review hardly mentions the environment in any meaningful way. There are a few poor jokes – the two mentions of ‘greenest government ever’, the promise to protect the marine environment with protected areas, the continuing obsession with a badger cull rather than control of bovine TB and closing an ash door after…
Problem with site corrected – I believe
If you have visited my website recently and encountered some information about V****a on it then I’m sorry about that but the site was temporarily hacked. I don’t think this lasted for more than a few hours, and I know that only a small number of users during the relevant period even noticed it (I…
Painless giving
I mentioned Give as you Live in a blog before Christmas and it still seems like a very easy way to raise money for charity. If I download ‘something’ while I am shopping online (don’t ask me how it works – I just click) then my chosen charity (which happens to be the RSPB) gets…
To do
This morning’s blog has attracted lots of comments – as raptor-related blogs almost always do. If you feel strongly about this issue then why not write to your MP about it. There is an excellent letter in the comments to this morning’s blog (by MK) to his (her? I suspect his) MP Alistair Burt (who…
Why raptor persecution is different
There has been a little burst of correspondence in The Independent over gamekeepers (and raptor persecution)(here, here, here). I note that one of the correspondents, Reece Fowler, crops up in quite a lot of places (including this blog) saying how nice gamekeepers are and how misunderstood (see here, here, here). I thought that Mr Fowler’s…
Patch work
The natural world is a source of great wonder to me. I enjoy being out there with my wellies on and binoculars around my neck. I enjoy thinking about species I may see or learn about in future. And I like re-living those special wildlife experiences. And I like having a local patch, Stanwick Lakes,…
Wildlife checklist
The start of a new year might be seen as a chance for a new start – although so could the start of every minute, sentence, and action. In that spirit, I will aim to give you a suggestion for something you could do every day of 2013 to help wildlife in some way. Sometimes…
The greatest European birds?
By Andreas Trepte (Own work) [CC-BY-SA-2.5 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5)], via Wikimedia Commons I think the following 11 bird species are the only ones which breed in every one of the EU’s 27 countries: kestrel, quail, moorhen, swift, swallow, house martin, reed warbler, spotted flycatcher, chaffinch, greenfinch, linnet. My source of information is ‘Birds in Europe: population…