– The Independent has come back to the subject of NE’s treatment by the coalition government and the need for an independent voice for nature – and this blog even gets a mention – do remember to go out and buy Birdwatch – if only to read everything else in it other than my first…
Category: Uncategorized
A natural solution
How do you feel about these two technological breaks-through which might change your life (if you live long enough)? Laser fusion is a way of forcing atoms together to make new atoms with the release of energy. Make a load of heavy hydrogen atoms come together to make helium and neutrons are released which produce…
Just a quickie!
I’ve been looking at the proofs of my first article for a well-known and excellent birding magazine. My first column as the Political Birder will appear soon. But where and when? Watch this space…. And I think that a reader called CaperKylie wins the prize (there is no prize) for the most amusing merger suggestion…
Are all Americans stupid?
I am, of course, only referring to American bird species. I ask the question because of a conversation I had back at the Bird Fair but first let me tell you about the Carolina parakeet. The Carolina parakeet was a native north American parrot that was widespread in the east of the USA when the…
Sharing or sparing?
A couple of my mates, and a couple of people I don’t know, have recently produced a paper in Science – the US-based not-quite-so-good version of Nature. They look at two versions of land-use and ask which is best as in the title of this blog. Starting from the point that we may soon have…
Do you trust them?
It’s all getting quite heated out there. And so it should – although it always looks bad if the government Ministers are the ones losing their tempers whilst the environmental campaigners are cool, calm and collected. But it’s not surprising, because the government is in a worse place over planning reform than it was over…
Rating your science
As a BTO member I recently got an email full of interesting information about that excellent organisation and including a link on the differences between the BTO and the RSPB. The impression you might get from this is that the BTO does the science and the RSPB uses the BTO’s science to change the world. …
All at sea over planning
Today you get two blogs for the price of none – this one’s about planning, the other is about being at sea (or they might both be about being at sea…) Government is talking tough about its contentious proposals for changing the planning system. In a joint article in yesterday’s Financial Times, the Communities and…
The war on biodiversity loss, cuts and bank voles
Last week the biodiversity (and many other things) Minister, Richard Benyon, was quoted on the matter of the recovering bittern population. The Minister said “To see a species that was once extinct in the UK rise to a population of over one hundred is a real achievement. This is largely down to the work of the…
No longer a passenger on our planet
Thursday was the 97th anniversary of the extinction of the passenger pigeon – once the commonest bird in the world and now a distant memory. The Independent newspaper published an article by me on the subject (click here) and regular readers will know I have a bit of a thing about passenger pigeons (click here,…