I knew this was a laurel in the garden but AI tells me it is a Portuguese Laurel or an English / Cherry Laurel depending on which version you believe. Either way the cascades of pretty white flowers are apparently known as racemes. I think this is the first year it has flowered.
Feeding the birds
I stopped feeding the birds for about a week following RSPB and BTO advice. Then I read that no actual cases of disease transmission have been related to hanging feeders and that bird tables and baths with dirty water are the problem (as has been thought for a while). This was from a firm which sells bird feed so is hardly likely to be unbiased, but I missed the birds and have been happy to see them quickly return as I resumed feeding. Unsurprisingly the Jackdaws were the first to catch on, then a Wood Piegon, the female Woodpecker and finally the smaller birds – Great and Blue Tits in particular and now the Dunnocks are back too. I just hope I am doing the right thing for what I admit are at least in part selfish reasons. Another delight has been to see quite a number of Swifts both in my village and another twenty minutes away where I took a Norfolk Terrier on a lovely walk for the Cinammon Trust. She lives close to a particularly beautiful stretch of the canal and we saw Pied Wagtails, four Mallard ducklings and two adult Tufted Ducks.
Global Justice Now
I have recently signed up to make a small monthly donation to Global Justice Now, Home – Global Justice Now Global Justice Now, “part of a global movement to create a more just and equal world”. The welcome letter was excellent and I really like these designs for two postcards and a sticker.
Battery cows
No matter what Jeremy Clarkson or anyone else might say, factory farming accounts for a huge percentage of animal farming in the UK. “The number of intensive dairy farms that permanently confine some of their cattle indoors has more than doubled in the past 10 years.” And there has been a doubling of the number of mega-dairies too. There’s no environmental regulation and the government doesn’t even know how many there are or where they are.
British Wildlife Magazine, Volume 17, Number, April 2026
What seems an extraordinarily niche article to begin with about Sternus rove beetles which I admit I have only skimmed it, but it’s amazing that they are “the most diverse group of animals on the planet, with at least 66,000 species.” There is a lot we don’t know about them and the species are very hard to distinguish but we do know that they have telescopic mouthparts making them highly successful predators and some species have the ability to walk on water in part because of the “water-repellent scales and hairs on their feet.”
Peter Smith contributes “Priced out of paradise – land prices and wildlife”. It had not occurred to me that the abolition of inheritance tax for agricultural land in 1992 made it much harder to buy land for conservation – low value land (in terms of productivity) was still a worthwhile purchase purely for tax reasons. Farming subsidies and planning rules also help to explain why land in Britain is among the most expensive in the world. Other factors making the prospect for conservation rather bleak include various financial incentives to plant trees, for example, which is often done in ways which do not necessarily benefit wildlife. The planting is rewarded rather than the actual outcome.
I have often wondered whether birds enjoy singing or if they do it purely for territorial and sexual reasons, rather hoping that they do enjoy it. Amy-Jane Beer tells of recent studies which show that birds experience a spike in feel-good hormones when they sing. It may be, she suggests, that they enjoy their song as much as we do. It’s a happy thought.
There is nothing quite like a carpet of (European) Bluebells or Hyacinthoides non-scripta and James Merryweather opens his article with a quote from Ann Brontë:
There is a silent eloquence
in every wild bluebell
that fills my softened heart with bliss
that words could never tell.
It turns out that for much of the year there is a lot going on underground too: mycorrhiza is “the symbiosis of plants with specialised soil fungi”. Spanish Bluebells, Hyacinthoides hispanica, incidentally, were introduced by the Victorians and are regarded as invasive. They can both outcompete and hybridise with the ‘native’ type, have no scent and are somewhat paler.
Rather pleased to see that a rare visitor, a Walrus was spotted in Fife. Meanwhile a Red Fox travelled as a stowaway on a cargo ship and ended up in the United States.
The wildlife reports are as comprehensive and beautifully illustrated as ever and the names of some of the species are wonderful. There are Great-tailed Grackles amongst the birds, Agile Frogs for the reptiles, from the moths Spring Usher, Pale Brindled Beauty, Belted Beauty, Tamarisk Peacock, Oblique Wainscot, Spiny Hook-tip, Cork Oak Nycteoline, Dark Sword-grass and Pearly Underwing. Then in the section on marine life we have the Depilatory Sea Hare, related to sea slugs, the Long Rough Dab and Corkwing Wrasse. A couple of fungi stand out too, the Ballerina Waxcap and the Olive Earth Tongue.
From Conservation News I do not at all like the sound of Birdex, a new app which turns birdwatching into a competitive game which might well lead to more disturbance of vulnerable species.
In Scotland salmon farming is being expanded, the opposite of what surely should be happening and there is to be further funding for the culling of Greylag Geese.
More happily it seems that there may at long last be some regulation for the gamebird industry. Protect the Wild is continuing its powerful campaign which echoes what I wrote in Animal Trust:
I used to eat pheasant, in the mistaken belief that their lives were at least better than those of farmed animals. But the truth is out of the box now, and it can’t be put back in. The battery farmed chicks have tape or brail put over one wing for months on end to stop them flying away and plastic devices (bits) attached to their beaks to stop them from pecking each other (this information only emerged after a liberation – the pheasants, we were told, would not be able to survive outside for those reasons; they didn’t seem to realise how damaging the revelations were). Each year, more is revealed, people are becoming more aware, and aware that they have been lied to all these years. It’s known that (some) gamekeepers kill birds of prey, especially on the grouse moors (another monoculture and nothing whatsoever to do with conservation) – there have been a few successful prosecutions now.
For the first time, a gamekeeper has been convicted in relation to Hen Harrier persecution. About time too.
___________________
To finish, something which made me smile. It was a remark by one of the guests on the BBC’s Masterchef (which I prefer now without the shouty men) about one of the competitor’s cuisine, describing it as coming came from “literally the four corners of the globe”.
Leave a Reply