Standing up for Nature
As part of a project to discover what might be driving the decline in UK Cuckoo numbers, the British Trust for Ornithology (BTO) has fitted four of these iconic birds with satellite tags. These tags will enable BTO researchers to follow the Cuckoos as they make their way to the Congo rainforest, where they winter,…
Next week I’m going to have to do my two ‘late’ BBS visits before the end of June. The combination of poor weather and rushing around has pushed them off the agenda but time is running out. I’m also going to have to finish the data entry for the English farmland bird surveys I carried…
The BTO website has had an overhaul and it looks very attractive. In a blog on the spanking new and attractive website, the BTO CEO Andy Clements (also a Board member of Natural England) writes about the scientific challenges for the new general licensing regime that Natural England is introducing. The blog is well worth…
A BTO research report, which looks quite good to me, is being used, wrongly, by SNH to justify further Raven culls. The report, essentially, says that killing a few Ravens won’t make any difference to the Scottish Raven population level. That is certainly true (and I give you that finding freely – no charge!). However,…
Tawny Owl. Photo: Howard Stockdale BTO Twenty minutes once during your week is all it will take to find out just how Britain’s Tawny Owls are faring. The British Trust for Ornithology (BTO) is asking members of the public to listen out for Tawny Owls to help build a picture of what is happening to…
Waitrose is still selling game meat to the public weeks after being told that the health warning it is displaying is inaccurate. For a leading supermarket which claims high environmental credentials for itself, it is behaving badly. What Waitrose claims on its website … … and it’s a bit difficult to see how selling game…
Details of the BTO conference can be found here. I can’t make it this year – but it does look like a conference with plenty of high points.
I completed the second survey for my second BBS square the other day. Very few birds on this visit – amazingly few actually. Even few Carrion Crows and few Wood Pigeons. And yet I added a new species to the site (this was my 14th year of surveys here) – a very topical Raven. Maybe…
I did my two Breeding Bird Survey Square surveys a little while back. Both were carried out on gloriously sunny mornings and both were very enjoyable. There is a smug feeling of being virtuous that one gets from being up early for a purpose, and especially if that purpose is volunteering for the public good,…
I spoke at the BTO HQ in Thetford on Thursday evening – and it was a fun evening. Indeed it was a fun day. There was an audience of 40+ people and we started at 1915 and they didn’t let me go until well after 2145! There were lots of questions, and some of them…