Month: August 2024
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Wild Pilot III. Named and shamed: three businesses which tried to break us
These stories would make very tedious reading if I were to go into too much detail (they may well be tedious anyway), but each is genuinely shocking and each company was clearly engaged in fraudulent behaviour. I am a very stubborn individual and I do not back down easily. Also, although I say so myself,…
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Sir Brian May, badgers & farmers: thoughts after the BBC programme
As previously discussed, Tim Bonner of the Countryside Alliance made a complete fool of himself by trying to stop the BBC from broadcasting the programme on the grounds that it was biased, before he had even seen it. Since I hadn’t seen it either, I made no claim that it wasn’t biased, but now that…
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Avian Architecture. Book review. Part I
Avian Architecture, How Birds Design, Engineer and Build, by Peter Goodfellow, Princeton University Press, 2024, revised and expanded edition. With a foreword by consultant editor Professor Tony D. Williams. Having had a fair few disappointments in my reading lately, this is one I have been saving up and it absolutely does not disappoint. Unsurprisingly, given…
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Birdwatch September 2024
The recovery of the Peregrine Falcon, a species which faced extinction in the UK in the 1950s (pesticides and illegal persecution of course), is welcomed – there are now 1,402 pairs, 62 of them thriving on man-made structures. There is much excitement about rare seabird sightings tempered with a concern that climate change is probably…
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Sir Brian May, badgers, farmers and the Countryside Alliance
Sir Brian’s long-awaited programme about the badger cull will be available on the BBC on Friday. For our badger group, campaigners and anyone else who has bothered actually to ensure they are informed before voicing their opinions, I doubt it will contain anything we don’t already know but I think it will be a huge…
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100 Words for Rain. Book review
100 Words for Rain and everything else you needed to know about British weather by Alex Johnson, National Trust Books, 2024. This a charming, light-hearted, interesting and informative book but it is not without flaws. There is no information about the author but he comes across as thoroughly likeable and someone who does not take…
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Talking with Psychopaths. Book review
Talking with Psychopaths; a journey into the evil mind, by Christopher Berry-Dee, John Blake Publishing, 2023. I seem to breaking my own tule of not doing hatchet jobs on other people’s books rather too often but here goes (if I can save one person the expense of buying this rubbish it will be worth it).…
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Flight Lieutenant Bertram Rota – a transcript
Bertram’s six-page autograph manuscript begins with a transcription of the article in The London Gazette, 23 January 1948, as mentioned and illustrated in the earlier post: An unusual decoration recently awarded (see London Gazette January 23rd 1948. Page 591) by King Haakon of Norway to fur RAFVR officers “for valuable services to Norway’s cause during…
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Valiant, my favourite childhood comic
This post is as much a long overdue tribute to my grandmother on my father’s side as anything else. Her name was Florence, née Wright and she was the first of my grandfather Bertram’s three wives. To have married three times was still quite unusual in those days. His second wife was a secretary of…
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Interrobang. Book review.
Shady Characters; Ampersands, Interrobangs and other Typographical Curiosities, by Keith Houston, Penguin Books, 2013. I loved this witty, erudite and fascinating book. I am not sure about the title “Shady Characters…” but otherwise it seems to me pretty much a perfect study of its subject, imbuing the characters with personality and charm. The author is…
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Perseids and Aurora
Having missed the last aurora completely, I now have the excellent Aurora Watch UK app to alert me to significant geomagnetic activity and a good night was indicated for August 12th, also the best night of the year for the Perseid “shooting stars” and for once the skies were clear. I now also have an…
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Turnstones. A return to Titchfield Haven
I had been waiting for ages for decent weather to revisit this beautiful nature reserve on the south coast which had half a chapter to itself in Animal Wild. Unfortunately most of it turned out to be closed for maintenance. Either I had checked an outdate version of the website or I hadn’t looked at…
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Dragonflies, damselflies and butterflies
Having waited impatiently for a week for the right weather to return to the idyllic spot on the River Lambourn we found on the last sett survey, it seems the gods of wildlife photography were smiling on me on this sunny, windless morning. Obligingly, these Beautiful Demoiselles damselflies were exactly where we saw them a…
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Flight Lieutenant Bertram Rota
This is the story of the part my grandfather, (Cyril) Bertram Rota, or CBR as he was known to his bookshop staff (my father, Anthony Bertram Rota was referred to as ABR), played in the Second World War. He died when I was four years old and was rarely around – I do not remember…
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Wildlife rescue and protest round-up
At HART Wildlife Rescue the busy season has just peaked. Monday was a relatively easy morning with eight volunteers in (six is really the minimum needed, sometimes there are only two) and most of the ducks and geese released or about to be. There are still plenty of hedgehogs though, foxes, fledglings and nestlings and…
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Sett survey August 2024 and a squirrel
This month we surveyed conveniently close to home, although it was not in an area I had previously explored. We saw a number of setts, a few already known to us, a couple were new. They were all active and showed signs of moderate use, but not more than that. The first few hours were…
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Ten Birds That Changed the World, a book review
Ten Birds That Changed the World, by Stephen Moss, Guardian Faber, 2023. I am not sure that I should even call this a book review, since I have only read two and a half chapters, which makes it unfair, but I am past the age of feeling that I absolutely have to finish every book…
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Wasp stings man
Headlines from yesterday’s The Times: Wasp stings man Prickly plants could be over, sharpish Girl hurt in gull attack Trail hunt defence (letters page) I have made up only one of these. It is of course the first one. But the others seem no less ludicrous. “The days of prickly plants being a thorn in…
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Charlotte Dujardin again
This post is actually to do with dressage generally. I have been reading a lot of Facebook posts, particularly those of “Milestone Equestrian”, a Canadian horse training business. From the nature of my interests, I would have expected to have seen more from animal rights proponents, but what I have actually been seeing is a…