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…
Tag: passenger pigeon
99 years
99 years ago today the passenger pigeon succumbed to extinction when its last surviving individual died a few feet from where this photograph was taken, in Cincinnati Zoo. A few decades earlier there had been billions of this bird flying around the forests of eastern North America. And so next year will be the centenary…
My swifts
They’ve gone for this year. It’s been such a lovely summer since I got back from the USA in late June. 2013 has been a butterfly year in the garden with lots of large and small whites and a few green-veined whites too. Also peacocks, meadow browns, gatekeepers and a single female common blue. My…
Saturday Cartoon from Ralph Underhill – priceless
I saw blue whales this summer in Monterey Bay, California – they were amazing and I will never forget them. I have seen more butterflies in my garden this year than for years and years – and I sent the details to Butterfly conservation for the Big Butterfly Count (you have today and…
Thank yous
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…
David, Gladys and other companions
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…
Top 10s
I covered 8270 miles in the USA and visited 20 states (TX, LA, AR, MO, KY, IN, OH, WV, WI, MI, PA, NY, IL, KS, CO, UT, NV, CA, AZ, NM) which means, completely incidentally, that I ‘need’ to visit only Oregon, Washington, North Dakota, Iowa (how did I ‘miss’ Iowa again?), Oklahoma, Mississippi, Alabama,…
Disappointed of NM, delighted of TX – blog 39
Yesterday wasn’t a perfect day. Nothing absolutely awful happened but it just didn’t work out that well. But today ended on a very high note. Yesterday I drove through New Mexico and Texas to get to a National Park of which I had heard many years ago – Carlsbad Caverns. Here I hoped to see…
Two cafes and a butterfly – blog 26
The only person on the scene, missing, was the Xerces blue – almost what Bob Dylan sang. A few days after I disclosed that I was leaving the RSPB, back in January 2011, I was in Oxford for the farming conference and had a coffee in a cafe with Martin Warren, the Chief Exec of…
Monterey Bay – blog 23
And now I am in Monterey, just up the road from Carmel where Clint Eastwood was mayor, and the setting for a couple of Steinbeck novels. Hello Pacific Ocean. Fisherman’s Wharf is a bunch of restaurants and gift shops that are keen to sell you fish food or hats and tea-shirts. But there are also…