Vanessa Amaral-Rogers is the Campaigns Officer for Buglife. After finishing her Masters in Conservation Biology at the University of Derby on bat ecology, she now works on science communications, legislation, pesticides and pollinators. In a quarry in the South-West of England, a small spider lurks. The Horrid ground weaver (Nothophantes…
Tag: Natural England
Guest blog by Hugh Webster: response to Tim Bidie
Mark writes; this was originally posted as a comment on yesterday’s Guest Blog by Tim Bidie but it seemed so good to me (and so long) that it might be better to publish it this way. Hugh Webster is a a biology teacher with a PhD in Behavioural Ecology, earned studying competition between large…
Guest Blog – The Good Intentions Paving Company by Tim Bidie (aka as ‘Monro’)
‘Monro’ posted over 100 comments on this blog between 11 October and 14 December on the subject of Hen Harriers and grouse shooting’. On 14 December, because I was getting a bit fed up with his repetitive comments, I offered him a Guest Blog to get it all off his chest in one go. I…
Oxford Dictionaries asked to re-word
Internationally-acclaimed author Margaret Atwood, former Poet Laureate Sir Andrew Motion and former Children’s Laureate Michael Morpurgo are among 28 major literary and media figures who have today written to the Oxford University Press. They are calling for the reinstatement of a host of words connected with nature and the countryside that have been removed from…
Defra – what are you for? 1
Defra – what are you for these days? You seem to lack energy (and direction and even any ideas). The performance of Defra has been woeful under the coalition government. Apart from the introduction of a small amount of money for Nature Improvement Areas (of which we have heard very little since) what has Defra…
Wildlife sites
Alan Parfitt made a good point in a comment here yesterday – SSSIs were originally meant to be good examples of fine habitats rather than a complete coverage of such habitats. Increasingly, they are the last remnants of those habitats and have remained largely because of their SSSI status. This is good news (the designation…
Cinderella sites – not having a ball (let alone going to one)
The Wildlife Trusts’ new report, Secret Spaces: The status of England’s Local Wildlife Sites 2014, draws on evidence gathered this year showing that more than 10% of the 6,590 monitored Local Wildlife Sites have been lost or damaged in the last five years. With predicted growth in housing, new roads and other infrastructure all set…
Weak on crime, weak on the causes of crime
17 December: Andy Sawford (Shadow Minister (Communities and Local Government); Corby, Labour): To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, if she will publish a consultation on a licensing scheme for commercial game shooting. George Eustice (The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs; Camborne and Redruth, Conservative): Landowners…
B(l)ooming great!
There are more Bitterns breeding in the UK than at any time in living memory. In fact, there are about 13 times as many bitterns now as there were in 1997, as there are over 140 booming males compared with 11 then. That’s one hell of a recovery – in fact, one heaven of a…
You voted for them…
The responses coming in from your MPs don’t seem to be impressing you very much from what I see. There is, as several people have mentioned, a standard Conservative response to our fairly standardised series of questions running up to the Rally for Nature. It’s not surprising that the answer is a standard one, each…