It’s a rare enough thing these days for new SSSIs to be notified – and now the West Pennine Moors has been notified. Actually, it’s already a day old. Very wittily the document explaining this points out that it is a 7600+ha extension to three existing small SSSIs. Read the documentation and it seems a…
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NE issued four Buzzard-killing licences
Natural England, the former independent conservation agency which now spends much too much of its time issuing licences to kill wildlife, has issued four licences this year to kill Buzzards, a native species of predator, because they might be causing serious damage to livestock known as Pheasant poults (a non-native species released into the UK…
Marty Feldman wouldn’t like it
I’ve been meaning to write about another e-petition for ages but somehow haven’t got around to it until now. David Lindo, the Urban Birder, started a petition to make the Robin our national bird following it winning a vote on the same subject (Hen Harrier came an amazing 9th remember). And it has done very…
Planet Earth 2
No snakes! Where were the snakes? No slithering chaser snakes, just cute Bobcats, Grizzlies and Snow Leopards. Considering the difficulty of glimpsing a Snow Leopard (I’m told), the cameraperson who got four of them in shot at once (a mother and her daughter with two randy males) must have thought that all their Christmases had…
Blocked?
This only applies if you are on Twitter. I did a bit of a clear out on Twitter a little while ago. I stopped following hundreds of accounts and blocked some others too. I have had three people come to me and ask to unblocked – and I have unblocked them all. I’ll do the…
Golden Eagles on a weak thermal
There ought to be a lot more Golden Eagles in the UK and the results of the most recent survey (2015) show that there are more than in 2003 so that’s good news. There are 508 pairs of Golden Eagles in Scotland which represents an increase of 15% which isn’t bad at all and is…
Julie Williams to succeed Martin Warren
Martin Warren‘s successor as Chief Executive of Butterfly Conservation will be Julie Williams.
Planet Earth 2
There is just the one planet Earth – and it is a fantastically amazing place. I wouldn’t want to live anywhere else. Last night’s opening programme in the new Attenborough series was breathtaking in its beauty – ‘that’s where I live’ we all should have been shouting. ‘I love that place!’. ‘What can I do…
Planet Earth 2
I’m looking forward to Planet Earth 2 which starts this weekend (Sunday BBC1 8pm) – the trailer is amazing and so are these images. What if? What if you could only watch this programme if you could prove that you had done something for wildlife this year? Or this week? It’s not a serious suggestion…
Gems from the written evidence 23 – an ex-gamekeeper
This is very interesting, and I suspect this man, an ex-gamekeeper was rather brave to speak out like this. Here are some excerpts from his written evidence: I am writing regarding the recent petition to ban Driven Grouse Shooting and its proposed debate in Parliament. My name is Paul Tooley and until recently I had…