Month: April 2024
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Beaver bombs part II
A review of the second part of Black Ops and Beaver Bombing; adventures with Britain’s wild mammals, by Fiona Mathews and Tim Kendall, Oneworld, 2023 The fifth chapter is all about bats and Horseshoe bats in particular. They are the authors’ special passion and that shines through. There are further atrocious puns although they do…
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Nuts & Bolts part II
Nuts & Bolts; Seven Small Inventions That Changed the World (in a Big Way), by Roma Agrawal, Hodder & Stoughton, 2023. This book continued to enlighten and inspire me to the end. There is no banging of drums, but the world view imparted by my Western education at least (and I’m guessing not much has…
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Horses “running amok” in London
Four terrified cavalry horses run through the streets on April 24th and two are badly injured, apparently spooked by builders dropping rubble from some height. The reporting is oddly coy as to what exactly happened and there is typical rabble-rousing use of words like “rampage”, which imply aggressive and deliberately destructive behaviour. There is a…
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Rescued Canada Geese – did they know they could fly?
I write in Animal Wild about how extremely fond I became of the five rescued birds, who were goslings when they were brought in and of the wonderful video of their release. They seemed to know immediately that in the wild and free was where they belonged. It is a fifty-minute journey for me to…
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Secrets of the Elephants
This is a superb four-part television series made by National Geographic and currently available on Disney+, narrated by Natalie Portman and featuring the lovely and highly knowledgeable elephant expert Dr Paula Kahumbu. She is one of those commentators, the best kind, who does not attempt to hide but only wants to share her joyous amazement…
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Garden birds III
Just a few observations and thoughts. I have been watching the pair of Dunnocks, a species described by the British Trust for Ornithology as having an “interesting” sex life, elsewhere as promiscuous, polygamous and indulging in “sneaky mating”. They are rather dismissively described by the BTO as a “little brown bird” and by others as…
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Dogs aren’t stupid
A bizarre article in The Times reports: “A study has suggested that most dogs can link words with familiar objects. The ability had been demonstrated in only a small number of “gifted” canines.” Well no shit, Sherlock. I hate to think how much money is spent on these pointless experiments. Anyone who lives with a…
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Angela Rayner
I’ll keep this short and to the point. So she may have benefited to the tune of £1,500. Possibly it was deliberate. More likely it was inadvertent – perhaps she just made a mistake, was tired or in a hurry, or ticked the wrong box. We have the most complicated tax system in the world.…
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British Wildlife magazine
Volume 35, number 5, April 2024. I have written about the opening article on mink eradication here Beaver bombs part I – Animal Wild. As I have said before, I love that contributors do not shy away from being outspoken, nor extremely niche. There are pages and pages devoted almost entirely to the Speckled Footman…
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Badger survey April 2024
This took place pretty close to home, I won’t be more specific for obvious reasons (we never publicly reveal sett locations). Not much to report but we did find two setts which were new to us, one large and with so much recent digging that it looked like a building site. I saw a muntjac…
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Black & White (& ChatGPT)
I commented in my review of Hilary Mantel’s A Memoir of My Former Self, A Life in Writing, John Murray, 2023, Long Live Dame Hilary Mantel – Animal Wild, that she uses capital case for the words Black and White when they are describing people, which I had not seen before. Then I noticed that Roma…
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Do NOT install Photoshop on Windows 11
At least, not anything other than a very recent version. I am posting this just in case anyone is thinking of doing it. I am no fan of Microsoft to put it mildly, but Adobe has not endeared itself to me this morning either. I had decided to install an admittedly pretty ancient version of…
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Nuts & Bolts
Nuts & Bolts; Seven Small Inventions That Changed the World (in a Big Way), by Roma Agrawal, Hodder & Stoughton, 2023, is a book I asked for and was given on my birthday last year. I was hopeless at physics at school. Our teacher, Mr Baker, seemed to have long since lost interest in the…
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An unexpected garden visitor
This totally made my day. I looked up from my usual morning crossword and coffee to see at 7 am, to my amazement, a male muntjac deer just a few feet from the window of my summerhouse. When I first saw him, I ruled out muntjac on the grounds of size – he seemed enormous.…
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Beaver bombs part I
A review of the first four chapters of Black Ops and Beaver Bombing; adventures with Britain’s wild mammals, by Fiona Mathews and Tim Kendall, Oneworld, 2023 This is a fairly detailed review without, I hope, too many spoilers (although there is so much good stuff it has proved hard to resist some retelling), of the…
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Jeremy Clarkson is a damn blasted liar
Christopher Columbus is a damn blasted liarChristopher Columbus is a damn blasted liarYes, JahAh, he is saying that, ah, he is the first oneWho discover JamaicaI and I say thatWhat about the Arawak Indians and the few Black menWho were ’round here before him? This is a part of the lyrics of a song by…
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Tice’s Meadow Nature Reserve
I was kindly invited to join a tour of this delightful place recently, which hosts a fabulous diversity of habitats and wildlife, by another HART volunteer. It is located on the outskirts of Aldershot, providing what I tend to think of as an essential pair of lungs to an otherwise heavily developed area. We formed…
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Long Live Dame Hilary Mantel
Long Live Hilary Mantel Hilary Mantel writes a great deal about ghosts – not the Scooby-Doo kind – and how the dead live on in our minds, our memories and our bodies. They are not gone but merely invisible to us. I wrote in earlier post about my encounters with her and our handling of…
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Garden Birds II, April 2024
Garden Birds II, April 2024 When my brother and I were young, a highlight of school holidays was a visit to Uncle Fred, our great-uncle on my mother’s side, a retired engineer who was married to her mother’s sister. He lived, alone after her death, in a large house in Pangbourne on the Thames (he…
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Garrick Club – rumblings in the corridors of power, happy memories and a sorry state of affairs
I joined the Garrick Club in 2009 and resigned at the end of 2023. When our bookshop was in Long Acre, Covent Garden, the club was just around the corner. My father was a member long before I was and used to go every Monday for lunch, usually sitting at the publishers’ table where others…