The picture above was taken in in January 2010 when the Kennet & Avon canal which runs through our village was partly iced over. No decent snow this year though.
Newsletter 139 from the Binfield Badger Group is an excellent issue, not just because they have partly reproduced my account of our last survey, for which see here:
Sett survey November 24 with many fungi – Animal Wild
It includes too an account of the talk we were given by Luke Waclawek of Oxfordshire Wildlife Rescue, and advice from the Badger Trust: the recent storms, one might forget, will have had potentially serious impact. Flooding can damage or even destroy setts and there will be less foraging ground for the badgers. Winter is not kind to them in other ways: longer nights mean deadlier roads, illegal hunting and sett blocking continue apace. Providing food for them on a regular basis will help. Andy McCoy goes into detail about the group’s monitoring of Berkshire Council’s planning portals and the great lengths they go to ask them to mitigate harm to wildlife, requesting up-to-date surveys, that site dangers are reduced (covering soil mounds which may be turned into setts overnight, giving trenches escape routes and capping pipework), not leaving sharp tools or poisonous substances out, using only hand tools near setts, ensuring that felled trees do not fall on setts, choosing suitable fencing allowing ingress and egress for badgers, keeping security lighting to a minimum and so on. It is not just the setts of course: foraging areas need to be protected and access to them too. Our present government seems to hold any measures to protect wildlife in contempt, not all constructors follow these obligations and sadly there is in any case no scrutiny.
Both Chris Packham and Caroline Lucas, president and vice-president of the RSPCA have resigned. I have been making the case for Chris Packham’s resignation for a while, but as I knew he surely would he has been trying hard to persuade the organisation to drop their lucrative farm and abattoir approval scheme before taking this drastic step. Footage of extreme cruelty at slaughterhouses from the hardcore Animal Rising group was the final straw.
My last stint at HART Wildlife rescue before Christmas yesterday , a relatively routine morning with a room full of hedgehogs. Sadly, a swan taken in has had to be euthanised after six weeks or so since it was continuing to lose weight without prospect of recovery, but a cygnet found on an A-road has been relocated and a fox with an eye infection came in and should do well. We also have a Kestrel and a Tawny Owl who will be released in due course. Meanwhile my friend reports from the Costa Rica rescue, where the skies look like this:
He lists the animals there – and these are just the residents, who cannot be released. About 80 to 100 parrots, parakeets and a Toucan, six White-tailed Deer, four Racoon, two Kinkajous and four Capuchin Monkeys, two Coati, two Coyotes, five Pecaries, three Spectacled Owls, one Grey Hawk and two sloths.
There is winter news from two of my favourite sanctuaries: Hillside Animal Sanctuary and Mane Chance Sanctuary. At Hillside neglected animals are taken in all the time, most recently six ponies and fifteen sheep. From Mane Chance there’s the interesting information that healthy horses do not really generally need rugs to protect them from the cold – their thermoneutral zone is much broader than ours and they have evolved to deal with all but extremes of temperature. Rugs can do more harm than good especially if they are not a good fit and can lead to a lack of necessary sunlight for their skin, sores and dangerous weight gain. I cannot recommend visiting and supporting both of these wonderful charities enough.
No surprises, but there is an allegation that Thames Water has behaved even more badly than previously supposed. Funds specifically earmarked for environmental cleanups and other projects and upgrades, used to justify consumers’ bill increases, were apparently instead handed out to investors and as bonuses. Thames Water denies this robustly, but given the £18m fine imposed by Ofwat this month for unjistified divided payments, they do not inspire much credence: “In October 2023, Thames Water made interim dividend payments totalling £37.5m to its holding company, Thames Water Utilities Holdings Limited. In March 2024, the company made further dividend payments amounting to £158.3m from which they received non-cash benefits.”
From the British Trust for Ornithology come highlights from 2024. Their extraordinary research reveals a decline in Oystercatcher numbers due to a number of factors, including commercial over-fishing, but at one site in particular, the Exe Estuary, it seems Herring Gulls and and Carrion Crows may be partly to blame since they are consuming large numbers of the mussels on which the Oystercatchers rely.
BirdGuides. From the British Birds Rarities Committee the latest report details nine firsts for Britain including Black-winged Kite, Grey-headed Lapwing, Western Olivaceous Warbler and Canada Warbler, amongst other eye-catching inclusions. A webcam in Leicestershire has recorded a Peregrine Falcon eating a rare Little Auk. Meanwhile the endangered Barbary Partridge may be accorded full species status. The world’s oldest known bird, a Laysan Albatross, has laid an egg at the age of 74 – she may even be older. There is also a fascinating piece about Bramblings by Sarah Harris, winter visitors to the UK, who apparently occasionally hybridise with Chaffinches. Huge flocks are seen on the Continent most winters, in one case perhaps as many as 36 million. A flock of approximately five million appeared in Slovenia during 2018-2019 occupying only ten hectares (I cannot visualise a hectare without reminding myself that it is about two and a half acres). Populations are in gradual decline however for reasons unknown. To identify Bramblings, “orange is the key” – orange shoulders and a wing-bar and an orange breast with a whiter belly. As ever, identification by plumage features alone is an oversimplification since major changes occur through the seasons. As usual BirdGuides offers wonderful photographs to savour.
Wild Justice continues its campaigns relating to driven grouse shooting, lead ammunition and rodenticide control with the sinking feeling that the government is “kicking the can down the road”.
The indefatigable Protect the Wild report on a violent attack on sabs by hunting people, members of the Hursley Hambleden Hunt, and on top of everything else they do, approach the issue of mental health issues amongst members of the protest and rescue movements. It is all too easy to feel overwhelmed and PTW has four videos by Dr Ishani Rao on its website relating to trauma management, burnout prevention, staying motivated and managing tension. This seems a hugely worthwhile initiative. They also ask the public to monitor the hunt Boxing Day parades (a number of which have now been told they are not welcome). There’s a new animation narrated by Chris Packham on the subject. Pleasingly, hunts continue to fold. PETA has also released a video review of the year and reminds us of some of their victories: “Together, we spared tens of thousands of monkeys doomed to be experimented on; convinced top designers to eliminate wild-animal skins, wool, and feathers from their collections; and persuaded Starbucks to stop charging extra for vegan milk—and those are just a few of our many accomplishments.”
Finally, as a Christmas treat, well for me anyway, I revisited the fascinating subject of the origins of UK place names, the suffixes in particular. From Old Norse (and in many cases Old English too) we have thorpe (secondary settlement), thwaite (forest clearing with a dwelling or parcel of land), bach (stream), by (settlement or village), dale, gate (road), firth, garth (enclosure or ridge), ghyll (ravine or narrow gully), holm, kirk, ness, rig or rigg, ster (farm), wick (bay) and various others. Deriving elsewhere ford, dale, dean, mere, minster, mouth, ness, pool, port and combe or coombe (and the Welsh variants) are relatively obvious, the Welsh prefixes aber and caer mean river mouth or meeting of waters and camp respectively, avon or afon, (a river), ay, ey or simply y denote an island, bourne and burn are rivers and bury, borough, brough, burgh indicate a fortified enclosure as do caster, chester, cester and so on. by is simply a village or settlement, cot a cottage, croft an enclosed field, ham a farm, hurst or hirst a hill. More surprisingly ing means followers of, so Reading = followers of Reada for example. shaw is a wood or thicket, stead a place or enclosed pasture, stoke a secondary settlement, toft a homestead, tun and ton similar, weald and wold high woodland. wick, wich and variants again simply place or settlement, worth an enclosure. I used to know much of this years ago but today have referred to the superbly curated list on Wikipedia:
List of generic forms in place names in the British Isles – Wikipedia
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