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: USA
Yosemite fire
I suspect I am following the news of fires affecting the Yosemite National Park a little more closely than most. That’s partly because I was there around two and a half months ago and also because there is an interesting conservation back-story to present day events. Yosemite, in the California Sierra Nevada mountains, was the…
‘Standing up for nature’ goes to America
My main task between now and the end of September is to finish writing a book ‘on’ the passenger pigeon for Bloomsbury – and for me and for you! 1 September 2014 will mark the centenary of the extinction of this bird – probably the most numerous bird in the world a few decades before…
You could be eating eagles…
Are you sitting down to eat a turkey later today? Benjamin Franklin wanted the turkey to be the national bird of the USA instead of the actual choice of the bald eagle. He wrote to his daughter thus: “For my own part I wish the Bald Eagle had not been chosen the Representative of our…
Bits, some bits
went to London on the train from Peterborough on Thursday and saw 3 cuckoos got a reply from NE re Walshaw Moor – will blog later this week spent ages on Friday evening looking at a lone wader in vegetation and gloomy light wondering whether it was a Temminck stint – and it wasn’t, it…