Standing up for Nature
In his book, Hope is the Thing with Feathers, Chris Cokinos describes the death of what may have been the last wild Passenger Pigeon at the hands of the young Press Clay Southworth in rural Ohio. That was on 24 March 1900 – after that, the only Passenger Pigeons known to man (and woman) were…
Sunday was, do you remember, the 99th anniversary of the death of Martha, the last passenger pigeon in the world, in Cincinnati Zoo, at around 1230 local time? At 1230 local time in the Central Library in Liverpool, I was looking at one of only about 120 remaining complete volumes of John James Audubon’s Birds…
I suspect I am following the news of fires affecting the Yosemite National Park a little more closely than most. That’s partly because I was there around two and a half months ago and also because there is an interesting conservation back-story to present day events. Yosemite, in the California Sierra Nevada mountains, was the…
Flight Centre at Cambridge for sorting out my flights and car hire and especially Samantha for moving quickly just before I left to correct the mistake of my car hire being booked at a different airport from the one where I arrived and left! I was lucky, in the Wayne National Forest to meet several…
I wasn’t on my own as I travelled across the USA. David came with me the whole way and Gladys was there almost throughout. The Sibley ‘Guide to birds‘ was in the passenger seat of my Hyundai Sonata right the way across the USA. Border Patrol officers glanced at it and were reassured that I…