Are you a wildlife enthusiast? I bet you are! If so, the Forestry Commission in England would like to hear your views – so you should take the opportunity to give them. Takes about 7 minutes, is not too taxing! Click here. Some of the questions are a bit odd but it’s nice to be…
Category: Uncategorized
BAWC crowdfunder going well
Was it really only yesterday that Birders Against Wildlife Crime launched their crowd funding appeal to set up a raptor-tagging project? In just over a day it has already raised getting on for £5,000 out of an initial target of £10,000. Thank you to everyone who has contributed so far. The project involves satellite-tagging raptors…
You don’t have to be an expert.
I am firmly of the opinion (which doesn’t mean that it is correct of course) that vast numbers of British people are really quite knowledgeable about birds, and that even more of them are thrilled by them. In Remarkable Birds I suggest that ‘almost every human who has ever lived has probably seen or heard…
Curlew stories
One of the winners of the writing competition on this blog, Kerri Ni Dochartaigh, is collecting memories, stories and fragments from folk of all walks of life about ‘the majestic and hauntingly beautiful curlew’. Please send anything you would like to share to Kerri at inchwhooperswan@gmail.com .
Who would you like to sit a GCSE in natural history?
Mary Colwell’s e-petition to develop a GCSE in natural history is doing well – over 4000 signatures already (see here and here). If it already existed then I wonder how many Defra ministers would pass it?
Highlander lives – probably.
The disappearance of Hen Harrier ‘Highlander’ off the airwaves may be due to tag failure, though this isn’t yet certain, but a tagged adult female answering to the description of Highlander (brown with a white rump but with an aerial that kinks left) has been spotted in some of her earlier haunts. Good news! I…
A303 to go underground – bring on the aurochs!
Today, the day after a proposal to ‘re-wild’ the landscape around Stonehenge was posted on this blog, the government finally announces its plan to place the A303 at Stonehenge in a tunnel. This announcement – if followed through – greatly increases the scope for large-scale habitat creation – and megafauna re-introductions – at the Stonehenge…
Time for tidal in the Severn Estuary?
The Hendry review is due to be published tomorrow and is expected to recommend the go-ahead for a tidal lagoon project in Swansea Bay. This has been the subject of a variety of posts on this blog: Guest blog – Time for tidal power by Sian John, 15 July 2016; NGO reaction to Swansea Bay…
Nature schooling
When Keith Betton interviewed the late, great Phil Hollom in Behind the Binoculars, Hollom said that when he was at school at Cockfosters in the 1920s he had looked out of the window during a school exam and seen a Red-backed Shrike. This would have been regarded as a mere distraction, though a pleasant one,…
Yellowstone
I visited Yellowstone NP in 2011 after I left the RSPB and headed off on a mind-cleansing road trip across the USA where I did a lot of thinking. But it wasn’t just thinking, it was an opportunity to see a lot of fabulous landscapes, meet some great people and see nature that I had…