When I sent out my short recent ‘newsblast’ to over 1300 people one of them replied as follows: “No,don’t send me anymore of your crap.When you start considering all bird life instead of just raptors then by all means.I put a bird table up 30 yrs ago,had it full of garden birds untill (sic) the…
Tag: sparrowhawk
The raptor haters? – Magnus Linklater
Magnus Linklater is a clever man as befits some Old Etonians and some former editors of The Scotsman newspaper. I’ve only met him once and we got on quite well as we looked at the heather moors of the Langholm Estate one sunny day. He wouldn’t deserve a place in this occasional series of articles,…
What has stayed the same?
In the June issue of British Birds – which has a lovely, vicious sparrowhawk on its cover, I was struck by the juxtaposition of two papers. One was about lesser-spotted woodpeckers and the other about Dartford warblers in the Thames Basin heathlands of Surrey. Each was an interesting and valuable record of what we know,…
Cats and sparrowhawks among the pigeons
Gary Burgess posted a comment on this blog on 18 February on a rather old blog and I thought that few would notice what he had written and so I offered him the chance of a Guest Blog to air his views more prominently. I’m really glad that Gary took up the offer but I…
Guest blog – Gary Burgess, a pigeon fancier
Hi all I’m Gary Burgess and I’m a Pigeon Fancier and would like to thank Mark for this opportunity to write this Blog. I grew up in the late sixties/seventies. It now seems such a long time ago, almost like the dark ages. I was fortunate back in those days to live in an urban…
An everyday story of country folk
Last week, a scene in a long-running play was acted to a conclusion. The play is a bit of a ‘whodunnit’ with heroes and villains – but since we haven’t yet seen the ending there is time for villains to repent. Sometimes it’s difficult to know on which side some people are until the final…
Mad Max again
Good to see that the RSPB has had a response to Max Hastings’s article of last week published in the Financial Times, a rather moderately worded response given the poor nature of the original article. It is always a bit of a lottery whether newspapers publish responses or not. It’s frustrating if errors go unchallenged…
An interesting report
At the Game Fair – I said those couple of days could keep this blog going for ages – I picked up a report by the National Gamekeepers Organisation considering the state of nature on commercial shoots. It’s an interesting read. With the snappy title ‘Gamekeepers and Wildlife’ this report compiles information from a postal…