Another new charity… Although some charities have an image problem this one will not, funded as it is by the competiton Bird Photographer of the Year.
Category: Uncategorized
Magnus Linklater and old Times
Magnus Linklater‘s piece in Monday’s The Times reminds me of many of his previous pieces (but we all believe in recycling) in that he always forgets to mention his close personal interest in game management and he always gets it a bit wrong in my humble opinion. Where he is undoubtedly right is that farmland…
A bit of a slow start…
I was listening to George Osborne on The World This Weekend yesterday and heard him say (15m 43s into programme) that his personal opinion was that the current government had got off ‘to a bit of a slow start’ in dealing with coronavirus. I think that is what everybody probably thinks. And in times of…
Pandemics and Passenger Pigeons
Ecologists like myself often have a bit of a blindspot for diseases. We don’t see their impacts very often in wild populations – this may be a particular failing of ornithologists. But there are some good examples of diseases having big impacts on populations – usually, of course, introduced diseases that arrive in a new…
Clapping
Yesterday evening at 8pm I stood outside my house and clapped. I didn’t do this last week as somehow I missed the fact that it was happening. I was early, I’m always early, I got to the gig at 7:59pm and there was already one guy, down the road, clapping away so I joined in….
Some comments on comments
There have been nearly 68,000 comments made on this blog since it sprang into life in spring 2011. Over 9,000 of them have been by me – replying to your comments. The rest have been made by several hundred folk – it would be a very time consumting exercise to work out quite how many…
Tidy houses, tidy inboxes, messy hair
Being confined to one’s house enables one to do some of that decluttering that never gets done at other times. The inboxes of my email accounts are now slimmed down and many emails are filed away properly and an awful lot are deleted. And the same goes for the house, although that is a much…
The declining Chaffinch?
I received an appeal for money from the BTO recently and its subject was the declining Chaffinch. I wasn’t aware that the Chaffinch was declining – they are still a common widespread bird, and just very parochially, if anything they are commoner now in my garden than they once were. So I looked with interest…
For the record…
The first time I mentioned coronavirus on this blog was on 27 February when I wrote; I’d be surprised if this disease kills as many people in the UK this year as die on our roads, but I might well be wrong. I may look foolish in future, but if so it won’t be the…
Delayed
I was going to write about welfare issues in horse racing – but, to be honest, I just don’t feel like it right now, so that blog is delayed, but it will come here eventually. But in the interim, have a look at the recent British Horseracing Authority report on the subject – click here.