There have been two guest blogs here by Kevin Cumming who is leading the buy-out attempt for Langholm Moor see here 2 December 2019, and 7 May 2020. There’s a well-produced and interesting podcast available here where you can hear more about things from Kevin and it ends with a chat with me. The fundraiser…
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Primates 3
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This was the last episode in an excellent 3-part series and was entitled Protecting Primates although, really, it wasn’t mostly about protecting primates and it was about quite a lot of things. If one wanted to be critical of the programme one would say that it was a bit bitty – and lacked a narrative…
Survey on views on genetic engineering as a tool for supporting conservation efforts
I got the following by email recently from ‘A Bigger Conversation’. For me it definitely fell into the ‘Sounds important, a bit complex and dull, and not very urgent’ so I didn’t do anything with it until now (isn’t that how we end up being unprepared for things like global pandemics). I responded in a…
Feathers 2
In the previous blog I estimated the number of feathers on living wild birds to be around 420 trillion. Now I’ve had the chance to check a few things I’d like to revise the estimate a little. The logic strikes me as pretty good. How many (wild) birds are there in the world and simply…
If Starlings had…
If Starlings had contrails, like planes, then the sky above my garden would be painted with the paths of Starlings taking food to their recently hatched young. Starlings are single-prey loaders when their chicks are young (they fly out from the nest to collect one item of food and fly back to the nest with…
Primates 2
The gibbons were particularly funky. And it’s the birthday of the primate narrator of this series today. Happy Birthday Chris Packham!
Can you help?
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Here’s a big pile of boxes; What is in the boxes? Photographic plates – lots of them. Photographs of what, you might ask? Photographs of birds, by John T Fisher. These glass plates, about 200 of them, are looking for a home, a good home. I’m merely an intermediary here. The slides were given to…
Lockdown Nature-Writing challenge entries
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I’ve started being a 9-5 person. I’m now often heading to bed at 9pm and waking at around 5am. This morning, after standing outside for a few minutes, to listen to the end of the dawn chorus, I turned on my computer to see that, as I expected, there was a flood of entries for…
What people are reading…
I’ve been asked by a few people about a good bird book – lockdown is making people look at what’s around them, and in many ways, the most obvious, alluring and beautiful things to watch are birds. And that’s why they are buying these titles on Amazon… The RSPB Pocket Guide is the 138th best-selling…
Yet another week on…
In each of the previous two weeks there were an extra 36,000 reported cases of coronavirus in the UK – this week there were 33,000 new cases. That is the extent to which the spread of the virus is slowing down – not much! The global reported deaths have recently passed 200,000 at the same…