Conder Head back in October 2018 This fire on the Abbeystead Estate’s Conder Head back in October has interested me. Is it on blanket bog? Apparently not. Is it on deep peat? Apparently so – see below a reply I received today. Well, we got there in the end. Natural England/Defra appear to be happy…
Category: Z SMALLER CATEGORIES
Guest blog series, A Break from Humanity (7) by Ian Carter.
Continued from last Saturday My potential destination for a spell of immersion in nature was, inevitably, chosen from the comfort of an armchair, aided by implausible online images of sun-drenched, white-sand beaches, and idyllic descriptions. The obvious next step, before launching headlong into the unknown, was a dose of realism. I needed to go there…
Guest blog series, A Break from Humanity (6) by Ian Carter.
Continued from Monday My interest in wildlife is all-pervading. It’s something I’m aware of, or at least alert to, all the time. I’d describe it as a mindset or a way of life rather than a hobby. And yet I felt it was gradually being eroded, despite a concerted effort over the past two years…
Guest blog series, A Break from Humanity (5) by Ian Carter.
Continued from yesterday It was my growing interest in wild food that, indirectly, helped me to crystallise my thoughts on my relationship with the natural world. I had been reading The Wild Life by John Lewis-Stempel in which he describes a year living on his small-holding in rural Herefordshire, feeding himself only on the wild plants…
Guest blog series, A Break from Humanity (4) by Ian Carter.
Continued from yesterday After eighteen months away from work I began to reflect on my time spent wandering around the wilder corners of mid-Devon. I was increasingly aware of a nagging sense of dissatisfaction. I’d seen plenty of interesting things, including species I’d been trying to track down for years without success, and I’d enjoyed…
Guest blog series, A Break from Humanity (3) by Ian Carter.
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Continued from yesterday… The decision to move down to the south-west offered the prospect of living in a less heavily-developed part of the country with a more varied countryside – a prospect enhanced by the free time I would have following redundancy. We rented Blagrove Farm, a house on a dairy farm in sparsely-populated mid-Devon,…
2018 in blog posts
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In 2018 there have been about 1000 posts on this blog. Some are photographs, some cartoons, some Guest Blogs and a whole lot of content is penned by me. Here is a very short collection of blogs, one a month, from 2018 that illustrate they types of posts you will find here in the coming…
Guest blog series, A Break from Humanity (2) by Ian Carter.
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Continued from click here We tried hard to make the best of what the fens had to offer. We lived close to the vast Ouse Washes nature reserve for several years and delighted in the fact that the reserve’s wild Whooper and Bewick’s Swans would overfly the garden most days in winter, on route between…
Guest blog series, A Break from Humanity (1) by Ian Carter.
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Mark writes: Ian Carter is a frequent contributor to this blog as a writer of book reviews, a series of Guest Blogs on Wild Food (but some others on other subjects) and as a commenter. I’m pleased to share this series of Guest Blogs from one of Ian’s writing projects with you. The first five…
Icelandic whaling update
An update on Icelandic whaling: Náttúruverndarsamtök Íslands (a bit like our Wildlife Trusts) has made a formal complaint regarding cruel methods of hunting and has asked for a criminal investigation into whether animal welfare laws have been broken. They’re basing their arguments on photos taken by Sea Shepherd showing multiple harpoon wounds.