Standing up for Nature
The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs has published positive cases of bird flu for each week since the last two weeks of December 2016. These figures used to be updated weekly but large gaps are now appearing between updates – click here. Positive cases are dead birds sent in to the authorities in…
Alick Simmons spent most of his career in public service serving as the UK Food Standards Agency’s Veterinary Director (2004-2007) and the UK Government’s Deputy Chief Veterinary Officer (2007-2015). He is the current chair of the Zoological Society of London’s Ethics Committee on Animal Research and a member of the Wild Animal Welfare Committee. He…
Yesterday I spent the afternoon at Geddington’s Green Fair, just a few miles away from home. I took some copies of Reflections and sold 10 of them – that was pretty good. I rarely go through Geddington but it is a pretty Northamptonshire village with a cricket pitch, village pub and church, stone cottages aplenty…
I can see a Red Kite from my Northamptonshire home every day of the year. I often pause to look at them even though I see them more often than I see a Buzzard or a Kestrel. I pause because they are just wonderful birds but also because they are a conservation success story –…
The UK’s most successful bird conservation project – for red kites – has come full circle and is now donating kite chicks to a similar project in Spain, the country that provided chicks for our red kite reintroduction project to England almost 35 years ago. In 1989, an ambitious project began to restore red kite…
Argaty Red Kites granted beaver translocation licence In a significant policy step, Argaty Red Kites in Perthshire has been granted Scotland’s first edge-of-range beaver translocation licence. Argaty, a working farm which is home to the award-winning red kite project, has been awarded a licence by the Scottish Government’s nature agency NatureScot for the release of…
This is the story of the Argaty Kite project, based near Stirling, and that itself is an interesting story, but this book is more than that, in that it is a tale of Red Squirrels, Pine Martens, dragonflies and a host of other creatures, and a tale of a place and a family. I liked…
This is one of those familiar x-rays of a shot raptor – see the pellets? I’m not at my best when identifying dead birds from x-rays but this is apparently a Red Kite. And Gloucestershire police would like anyone with information to step forward… I noticed that someone commented on this subject that they wouldn’t…
This is the propsed logo for the new county of North Northamptonshire from April next year. This is a modified version of one of the logos which was proposed back in the summer. I’m very happy with this and although this wouldn’t have been my preferred option it is an improved version of my second…
I live in east Northamptonshire at the moment, in a District Council area called East Northants which is the eastern end of Northamptonshire and is one of seven district councils; East Northants, Northampton, Wellingborough, Corby, Kettering, Daventry and South Northants. But soon Northamptonshire is being split into two new local council areas: West Northants and…