Does the Pope believe in cod?

Apologies for the title but I couldn’t resist… Although being a person of no faith myself, I sometimes wonder why religions are not much more involved in the moral case for nature conservation and animal welfare. I guess they are probably more involved than I notice but there is no way that they could be…

Good to see

Sir David has had a jab, the Queen’s had a jab and my mother and mother-in-law have both had two jabs. The 94-year-olds of the UK are getting jabbed up, and Northants seems to be pretty quick off the mark. Hooray! Q: What percentage of the UK population is aged 90+ years do you think?…

What do you think of this?

Who doesn’t love a turtle? asks the headline. Quite a few to judge from the reception this piece got on social media. Two lads planning to make money out of captive breeding reptiles and amphibians and with an ambition to reintroduce herptiles to the UK – quite a few of them. When I was their…

Interesting and important paper

This paper (accepted for publication and avialable online – but may have some last minute changes added to it in terms of copyediting) looks at trends in wetland bird species across RSPB nature reserves and compares them with ‘counterfactuals‘. You’ll have to read the paper to find out what counterfactuals are in general, and which…

Wildcats again

Apologies for the late posting of this morning’s post – technical issues connecting to the database (whatever that means!). Yesterday’s guest blog by Dominic Woodfield was on a contentious issue – the right way to conserve Scottish wildcats. This is an important issue and I’m grateful to Dominic for writing about it. What doesn’t seem…