Month: October 2024
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A few more fungi, local poaching, Thames Water and the budget
We are fortunate to have another natural archway very close by. This leads to Barton Court, formerly the home of Sir Terence Conran, now of Pippa Middleton and her family. It was a favourite walk or cycle with the children and we knew it as the conker way (as opposed to the donkey way, or…
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Birdwatch November 2024
When I said to one of the tour leaders on my trip to Norfolk that the egret was my favourite bird, he asked which one. I said I really didn’t mind – Great, Little or Cattle. They share an extraordinary elegance. I should have known it wouldn’t be as simple as that. There are both…
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Wildlife crime and protest
Illustrated, for no particular reason, with photos from a recent short walk along the canal at Hungerford, showing a few common hybrid Mallards and a Moorhen. A new report from the RSPB on the illegal killing of birds of prey, protected by law under the Wildlife and Countryside Act of 1981, uses data collected over…
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Paddington Bear
The nearby town of Newbury was home to Michael Bond, the creator of Paddington Bear. I loves the books and the films were, I thought, terrific. Following the unveiling of a statue of Paddington in Newbury and elsewhere to promote an upcoming film, someone has written to the local paper suggesting that a blue plaque…
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How to Read a Tree. Book review
Tristan Gooley’s How to Read a Tree, clues and patterns from roots to leaves, Hodder Press, 2024. I cannot think of another example of my completely changing my mind about a book about a third of the way through, although I am never going to like the cover very much. Dare I say it grew…
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Star Trek Beyond
Trek or Wars? If that question makes no sense, this post is probably not for you. I am very definitely on the Star Trek side of the fence. The first Star Wars film was groundbreaking and enjoyable but after that I found myself bored to tears, especially by the second, The Empire Strikes Back, which…
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Focus on fungi
I spent a very happy and sunny afternoon at Snelsmore Common, a local nature reserve renowned for its variety of heathland, mires and woodland. It brought back happy memories – I used to take the children there regularly for walks and cycle rides. Sadly the old fire tower has gone, pulled down because of vandalism…
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World Horse Welfare
The autumn/winter 2024 newsletter is here. I visited briefly once and was impressed. They do a huge amount of good work and campaigning especially regarding live exports for slaughter, now at last illegal in Britain. And they are responsible for many, many rescues and rehomings. But I cannot put my heart into it since they…
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A global check-list for birds
I was keen to explore this topic as reported in BirdGuides online. There are three global avian lists most widely used but inevitably there are differences between them. The plan is to unify them in one final list, AviList, which it has been agreed will be the official taxonomic reference. As ever with such matters,…
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“Vicious and brassy flying rats”
In my previous post which was in part about hated bird species, I mentioned that the description of pigeons as “rats with wings” was coined by a New York parks commissioner. It is quite the coincidence (or the result of a very clever algorithm in Microsoft Edge’s news feed) then to see these bizarre words…
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Snakes, Amur Falcons, Gulls, Swans, Pigeons and Trees
As is often the case, this particular tangential pathway began with the answer to a crossword clue, a word I had not come across before: Ringhals. Also known as the Rinkhals, this turns out to be a highly venomous spitting cobra-like snake. The name seemed to me likely Afrikaans, and indeed it is originally a…
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British Wildlife magazine October 2024
Volume 36, Number 1 Following the first article, “Rewilding and the woodland ground flora”, Brett Westwood declares himself a psammophile, a word new to me, meaning species which thrive in sandy soils. I also learn from him of ventifacts, “glacial drift pebbles smoothed by windblown sand.” What a beautiful, poetic definition. He argues that although…
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One hundred years of bookselling. December 2023, the original version
2023 was the centenary year of our bookshop, Bertram Rota Limited , founded by my grandfather. His uncles, who gave him his first job, and their father were booksellers too. My father took the helm in 1966 and I joined the business in 1995. In modest celebration, I wrote and sent to customers “monthly musings”…
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One hundred years of bookselling. December 2023
2023 was the centenary year of our bookshop, Bertram Rota Limited , founded by my grandfather. His uncles, who gave him his first job, and their father were booksellers too. My father took the helm in 1966 and I joined the business in 1995. In modest celebration, I wrote and sent to customers “monthly musings”…
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One hundred years of bookselling. November 2023
2023 was the centenary year of our bookshop, Bertram Rota Limited , founded by my grandfather. His uncles, who gave him his first job, and their father were booksellers too. My father took the helm in 1966 and I joined the business in 1995. In modest celebration, I wrote and sent to customers “monthly musings”…
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One hundred years of bookselling. October 2023
2023 was the centenary year of our bookshop, Bertram Rota Limited , founded by my grandfather. His uncles, who gave him his first job, and their father were booksellers too. My father took the helm in 1966 and I joined the business in 1995. In modest celebration, I wrote and sent to customers “monthly musings”…
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One hundred years of bookselling. September 2023
2023 was the centenary year of our bookshop, Bertram Rota Limited , founded by my grandfather. His uncles, who gave him his first job, and their father were booksellers too. My father took the helm in 1966 and I joined the business in 1995. In modest celebration, I wrote and sent to customers “monthly musings”…
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One hundred years of bookselling. August 2023
2023 was the centenary year of our bookshop, Bertram Rota Limited , founded by my grandfather. His uncles, who gave him his first job, and their father were booksellers too. My father took the helm in 1966 and I joined the business in 1995. In modest celebration, I wrote and sent to customers “monthly musings”…
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One hundred years of bookselling. July 2023
2023 was the centenary year of our bookshop, Bertram Rota Limited , founded by my grandfather. His uncles, who gave him his first job, and their father were booksellers too. My father took the helm in 1966 and I joined the business in 1995. In modest celebration, I wrote and sent to customers “monthly musings”…
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One hundred years of bookselling. June 2023
2023 was the centenary year of our bookshop, Bertram Rota Limited , founded by my grandfather. His uncles, who gave him his first job, and their father were booksellers too. My father took the helm in 1966 and I joined the business in 1995. In modest celebration, I wrote and sent to customers “monthly musings”…
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One hundred years of bookselling. May 2023
2023 was the centenary year of our bookshop, Bertram Rota Limited , founded by my grandfather. His uncles, who gave him his first job, and their father were booksellers too. My father took the helm in 1966 and I joined the business in 1995. In modest celebration, I wrote and sent to customers “monthly musings”…
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One hundred years of bookselling. April 2023
2023 was the centenary year of our bookshop, Bertram Rota Limited , founded by my grandfather. His uncles, who gave him his first job, and their father were booksellers too. My father took the helm in 1966 and I joined the business in 1995. In modest celebration, I wrote and sent to customers “monthly musings”…
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One hundred years of bookselling. March 2023
2023 was the centenary year of our bookshop, Bertram Rota Limited , founded by my grandfather. His uncles, who gave him his first job, and their father were booksellers too. My father took the helm in 1966 and I joined the business in 1995. In modest celebration, I wrote and sent to customers “monthly musings”…
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One hundred years of bookselling. February 2023
2023 was the centenary year of our bookshop, Bertram Rota Limited , founded by my grandfather. His uncles, who gave him his first job, and their father were booksellers too. My father took the helm in 1966 and I joined the business in 1995. In modest celebration, I wrote and sent to customers “monthly musings”…
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One hundred years of bookselling. January 2023
2023 was the centenary year of our bookshop, Bertram Rota Limited , founded by my grandfather. His uncles, who gave him his first job, and their father were booksellers too. My father took the helm in 1966 and I joined the business in 1995. In modest celebration, I wrote and sent to customers “monthly musings”…
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One hundred years of bookselling – an introduction and quick guide
2023 was the centenary year of our bookshop, Bertram Rota Limited, founded by my grandfather. His uncles, who gave him his first job, and their father were booksellers too. My father took the helm in 1966 and I joined the business in 1995. In modest celebration, I wrote and sent to customers “monthly musings” all…
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If you go down to the woods today…
If you go down in the woods today, you’re sure of a big surprise.If you go down in the woods today, you’d better go in disguise,For every bear that ever there was will gather there for certainBecause today’s the day the teddy bears have their picnic. Well I wasn’t really expecting teddy bears nor a…
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The order of adjectives
This is a big red ball. And this is a small black cat. The point being that it would be very odd to have these adjectives in reverse order in normal circumstances. You would only say “the red big ball” if distinguishing it from a number of other big balls. It seems English speakers subconsciously…
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Birds & bees
I have already posted the image above (Teal) in one of the Norfolk trip posts but thought it deserved a second outing. I love the colours. E-mail news from Birdguides is in. Cattle Egret, seen in Norfolk, are as I suspected a relatively recent phenomenon here in terms of numbers and they are doing well.…
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The Trees of Life and Language, fractals and the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis
I was recently shown a picture of a bird on someone’s phone and and asked if I could identify it. From a distance, obviously a crow. Perhaps it was melanistic, I suggested. What I meant was leucistic. Which is, kind of, the opposite (I mentioned a rare melanistic female House Sparrow seen in Northumberland in…
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The suppression of protest and a political confession
What has brought all of this to mind is watching Netflix’s excellent and deeply moving Strike: An Uncivil War, a documentary about the miners’ strikes under Thatcher and in particular the police brutality meted out at Orgreave. There have been calls for an inquiry ever since, refused by Tory governments over and over again. There…
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Birdwatch / BTO News / The RSPB Magazine Autumn 2024
I found this issue of BTO News tough going, mostly because none of the news is good, especially when it comes to seabirds as has been widely reported. A piece on Yorkshire is, frankly, as depressing as the rest mostly recording species declines. Birdwatch is altogether more upbeat, reporting the upswing in the Cornish Chough…
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The legacy of colonialism (and feudal entitlement)
Three articles in last week’s Sunday Times I found very thought-provoking. The first is about the Pitt-Rivers Museum in Oxford. I visited some years ago and it is certainly a gruesomely intriguing display of the results of colonial theft. The shrunken heads are no longer exhibited however. I feel for the director, Dr Laura van…
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RSPCA Assured scheme scandal update
I have written about this several times, most recently, following Brian May’s resignation as vice-president, here: HARDtalk with Ingrid Newkirk – Animal Wild I had allowed myself to believe that the RSPCA made no money from the wholly discredited scheme and so remained mystified as to why they didn’t just drop it. Why did I…
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Wonders of wildlife in Norfolk part V, Kelling Heath and Roydon Common
At Kelling Heath (an SSSI) our brilliant guides managed to find us Mistle Thrush, a Stonechat and a Dartford Warbler, as well as a Kestrel. Steam trains were regularly passing through which was a touch surreal. Roydon Common is another Norfolk Wildlife Trust reserve, again managed with very great care, including using happy Dartmoor Ponies…
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Wonders of wildlife in Norfolk part IV, Cley, Norfolk Wildlife Trust
Delightfully, the entire travel group had been given free membership of the Trust for a year, including an excellent welcome pack. It’s a smart idea – I suspect most of us will happily renew when the time comes. The pack consists of a very full calendar of wildlife events, a sticker, a guide in the…
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Wonders of wildlife in Norfolk part III, RSPB Titchwell Marsh
As with Snettisham this is a conflation of two visits, on the second of which I decided to go off on my own. Rather than searching for a particular species, my favourite kind of birdwatching is from a hide, with my camera and kit, seeing what’s there. It’s a gorgeous place. It also allowed us…
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Wonders of wildlife in Norfolk part II, RSPB Snettisham and the Knot Spectacular
We visited on two consecutive days – any doubts about that given the early starts were quickly cast aside since each day was completely different. I will however conflate the two visits except to say that on the second, the light, especially for photography, was pretty much perfect. We arrived and parked up at around…
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Sett survey September 2024
For obvious reasons, locations of our surveys and especially the locations of setts is left deliberately vague but the combined presence of badgers and supposedly bio-secure (according to at least one farmer) free-ranging cattle on Greenham Common in Berkshire is so well-known and controversial that there seems little harm in saying that we spent some…