Month: March 2026
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Bird matters, birds matter and other wildlife
My bird of the day is the Blackbird. As well as the two books mentioned in earlier posts, I am drawing on the charming book above, Bird Lore, the Myths, Magic and Folklore of Birds, Quadrille, 2025, by Sally Coulthard, which has delightful illustrations by Clover Robin. It turns out that the “calling birds” in…
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British Wildlife magazine part I; lawyers for animals and the environment
The latest British Wildlife magazine has come through the letterbox too, Volume 27, Number 4, February 2026. By coincidence in terms of the content of much of the rest of this post, it opens with Alexa Culver’s ‘A confluence of crises in English nature laws’. The Bio Diversity Net Gain legislation of 2024 was far…
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Great Tits, Birdwatch Magazine, Tree Sparrows, Global Justice Now, Greyhound Racing and … Spring at last
After Wood Pigeons and Jackdaws, the first bird I saw today was a Great Tit. New to me from the garden bird books was the fact that the black chest stripe tapers off in the females but continues downwards and broadens in the males, for whom the width is a status symbol which attracts females…
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Wood Pigeons, the British Trust for Ornithology News
Bird of the day, the first I saw this morning, is the Wood Pigeon. Actually they are the first I see most mornings since they perch on the wires across the road outside my office window. There is always a pair here and they are often seen in a group of three which I find…
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Cognitive dissonance (Cheltenham again), the guga hunt and Gordon Ramsay, ‘magic numbers’, the nature of time, Keith Mann and Alexandra Paul, scones, the Royal Mint, Animal Rahat and more
Cognitive dissonance and Clare Balding Cognitive dissonance is something I am as guilty of as anyone when it comes to consuming chicken, fish and dairy. I don’t know how people achieve it when the animal abuse is going on right in front of them. Clare Balding, for example, attended the Cheltenham Festival this year and…
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Crufts, Cheltenham Festival, the RSPB, MBR Acres, the Cottesmore Hunt and Robin Ince, Jackdaws
So, the Crufts best in show winner was a Clumber Spaniel. This is a breed very prone to a variety of health problems. These include lameness, heat sensitivity, difficulties conceiving and giving birth, ear and eye conditions, spinal disc herniation and hip dysplasia. In other words, the breed symbolises everything that is wrong with the…
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Seashells, Hippos, Cheetahs, the trouble with birdwatching, corrupt politicians and an amazing panorama
Seashells These shells were no longer wanted in my son’s room and so I have relocated them to the summerhouse which is getting rather cluttered with wildlife books, objects and art. I had forgotten we had them and cannot remember where they came from. They made me think of my good fortune in being involved…
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Raising Hare; Starmer etc. Crufts; Protists; Asimov; Rewilding; EIA – whaling and porpoises
I was recommended Raising Hare, the heart warming true story of an unlikely friendship, by Chloe Dalton, Canongate, 2025, by a friend’s mother. I was worried that it would be a story of a well-meaning amateur doing more harm than good but that was entirely a false assumption. Dalton is always respectful, mindful, thoughtful and…
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The British Trust for Ornithology Conference 2026. Part II
Sam Langlois gave an overview of seabird monitoring and tracking. In the past we simply have not known what goes on when the birds are out at sea but now with telemetry in the form of GPS tags, we have data to inform marine spatial planning, species ecology and in particular Marine Protected Areas. We…
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The British Trust for Ornithology Conference 2026. Part I
In most respects this was as rewarding as it was last year. It was tiring. The lovely lady I was next to said that she also felt exhausted having taken in so much information. The venue was the Mercure Hotel in Northampton. I understand the need for a fairly central location but this was not…