Month: September 2024
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Wonders of wildlife in Norfolk part I
This was a trip lasting almost five days with Wildlife Worldwide, a firm I have travelled with before, with mostly great results. They were twelve other wildlife lovers (we all got along very well and the spirit was positive and good-humoured) and two excellent and supremely knowledgeable tour leaders, Nick Acheson and Ed Hutchings. Nick…
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HARDtalk with Ingrid Newkirk
Interviewed by the always incisive Stephen Sackur on the BBC’s HARDtalk, the PETA president was magnificent. She was, as ever, calm, assured, and totally unflappable. She gave her answers politely but was never mealy-mouthed. Quietly forceful, never strident. “Animals are not like us,” she said, “they are us.” Her interviewer provocatively suggested that animals do…
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Tony Blair, the Amol Rajan interview
Released on September 4th 2024, this was not revelatory for me, but it was confirmatory of everything I have thought about the shameless unprincipled man whose name I prefer to spell Bliar, since even before he became prime minister. Amol Rajan is interesting – he was born in India and was editor of The Independent…
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Spurn Migration Festival 2024
This took place over the 6th, 7th and 8th September. I had been looking forward to ‘Migfest’ for weeks. It was a damp squib, literally and figuratively. My expectations had been way too high. I had imagined if not Glastonbury, at least WOMAD or a smaller festival but with birds instead of music. The main…
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British Wildlife magazine August 2024
Volume 35, Number 8 Another terrific issue. I have illustrated this post with various recent wildlife photographs of my own. “The surreptitious westward advance of the Harbour Seal” is the title of the lead piece by Stephen Westcott. Harbour and Grey Seals were not treated as distinct species until as recently 1936. The former, which…
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Starmer, farmers, foxes, badgers, salmon and more
Sounding and feeling a little like a Roman Catholic penitent at confession, it has been two weeks since my last post. It has been a busy time – my son turned 18 and so there was much celebration, I travelled to the hugely disappointing Spurn Migration Festival near Hull, of which more in a separate…