The government published its response to the report of the report of the Independent Panel on Forestry last week. You will remember that 38 Degrees launched a campaign to Save our Forests and more than half a million people signed the petition worded as follows: The government is planning a massive sell off of our…
Tag: Natural England
Felled trees call for help
I was interested to read this story that trees in the Amazon rainforest were being fitted with mobile phones . If the tree is illegally felled, and reaches somewhere with mobile phone reception it starts making calls to the authorities; ‘Come and get me! I’m on the truck of an illegal logger!’. It’s an interesting…
Wood and trees
The next three days should see the Government response to the report of the Independent Panel on Forestry – a nation holds its breath. Government has hardly rushed into print having had nearly seven months to read a 72-page report. I am still of the opinion that there is a real need for government to…
Guest Blog – ‘Muzzled Watchdog’ to ‘Toothless Terrier’? by Helen Kirk
Helen Kirk has been described as ‘an indefatigable and tenacious environmental campaigner and amateur naturalist’. For more than 30 years she has championed and helped safeguard the Humberhead peatlands, and the special plants and creatures that depend on them. She is the executive secretary of the Thorne and Hatfield Moors Conservation Forum and has recently…
Our vanishing flora – new Plantlife report
Our Vanishing Flora is a new report from Plantlife. This report tells the awful story of how local losses of plants from our counties add up to a national disgrace. Over the reign of HM The Queen 10 plant species have become nationally extinct – hardly a subject for a jubilee celebration. Those…
Early Day Motion 603 – please help protect the National Wildlife Crime Unit
Red kites are ‘eating up lots of larks’ according to ‘real countryman’ Clive Aslet and our species has to intervene. But at least the Countryside Alliance admits, when faced with the evidence of an almost complete lack of breeding hen harriers in England, and Bowland Betty’s shooting in northern England, that the odd case of…
Food for thought
I expect you have eaten well over the break and are probably, like me, a bit podgier than a couple of weeks ago – or maybe not? If there is anything that might put you off your food it is the sound of the President of the NFU going on about the need for greater…
Lancashire’s ‘Bowland Betty’ bites the Yorkshire dust
A female hen harrier raised in the Forest of Bowland, Lancashire, last year, and fitted with a satellite tag, was found dead on a grouse moor in the Yorkshire Dales in June this year. I hadn’t realised the trans-Pennine rivalry was so strong that the War of the Roses included shooting each other’s hen harriers….
Support the National Trust please
This blog has touched on the performance of the National Trust as a nature conservation organisation a few times (including yesterday) and hasn’t always been gushing in its praise for that immensely successful organisation – immensely successful in selling itself, nice cakes and a day out, that is. But fair’s fair and here is an…
Ralph Underhill cartoon – without a murmur
This week has seen the publication of the latest State of the UK’s Birds report by a whole bunch of UK conservation organisations. The media coverage (here, here, here) highlighted the fact that 44 million birds have disappeared from our lives since 1966. But this loss passed by without much of a murmur, let alone…