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…
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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.
Earth Hour and another hour
This evening, at 20:30, it’s Earth Hour where we are asked to turn off lights etc for an hour. I’ll be doing it – will you? And overnight we will make the twice-yearly one hour change to our clocks. Spring Forward, Fall Back, yes I know. This has become, to me, a symbol of our…
This morning
When I went to check if the milk had been delivered at 0620 this morning I found a pint of skimmed milk and a decorated pebble. The pebble made me happy and I’ve been using it as a paperweight while reading some papers for a meeting, out in the garden, in the sunshine. Every time…
Chatting to Charlie
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Charlie Moores is a very nice man. His latest good idea is to have a series of podcasts ‘checking in’ with various people. Here’s him checking in with me – recorded on Sunday morning – where we talk about life, birds flying past, Wild Justice’s legal challenge against Natural Resources Wales and a few other…