Author: Julian Rota
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Lost Paths, part II
The Lost Paths, a History of How We Walk from Here to There, by Jack Cornish, Penguin Books, 2025 (first published 2024). I am delighted to see now that the fox on the front cover appears on the spine of the book as well. The buttercup and clarkia (I think) photos from the garden are…
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Sewage protest, Thomas Hardy’s sundial
A little bit of admin. I have been becoming increasingly frustrated with WordPress hanging and being unable to save my posts which have invoved a lot of rewriting. The online AI help remains worse than useless and itself simply crashes but it did recommend switching to Chrome, which I have now done, since MS Edge…
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A footpath: how many angels can dance on the head of a pin?
The first Oxeye Daisy has flowered in the garden today with others seeming impatient to do the same. An annual joy. A footpath … or not? Footpaths and right of way certainly seem to be a theme at the moment (see Lost Paths, part I – Animal Wild). As has been prominently reported in the…
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Animal Wrongs, Surds and Sophie Orde-MccGwire
Yet again the fern above has arisen like a phoenix as it does every year, seemingly lusher and more brightly green than ever. “Animal Wrongs” refers back to the book which kick-started my collection of books and other material relating to animal rights and I gave an account of buying it in Animal Trust: “My…
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Dorset
My favourite English county, Northumberland running a close second. Friends had invited me to stay for the weekend at their gorgeous house in Swanage, a place full of happy student memories for me. It is right on the point, the sea just a few feet away. I remembered that the nearby Wellington Clock Tower (1854)…
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Lost Paths, part I
The Lost Paths, a History of How We Walk from Here to There, by Jack Cornish, Penguin Books, 2025 (first published 2024). I am loving this book. It didn’t take long to win me over, no longer in fact than the realisation that the author is director of England (and formerly head of paths) at…
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Birds, Greenpeace, Norfolk Wildlife Trust and Snoopy
Before moving on to more pleasant matters, a quick follow-up on yesterday’s post about the Green Party, Zack Polanski and the right-wing media’s traducing of him. I have since come across two more disgraceful interviews, one by Mandelson’s friend Trevor Phillips and one by Laura Kuenssberg. Far worse than either is the cartoon which appeared…
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The Green Party
I have generally and perhaps timidly tended to avoid some of the most controversial issues of our times and indeed politics generally in this blog, making exceptions for Trump and Starmer and his nature hating government and their lies. Now with the elections two days away I am screwing my courage to the sticking plate,…
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Nihil desperandum
I have been reminded yet again this week that a path guided by animal advocacy and compassion can be hard, alienating and sometimes lonely. I have caused nothing but trouble for myself and angered others by speaking out on the recent deliberate creation of inbred puppies locally. In the very first paragraph of my first…
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Secret Africa and wildlife and other animal news
A delightful surprise visitor to the garden yesterday, a female Beautiful Demoiselle. She had moved on by the time I came back with my camera but this is a male I photographed in April 2024. A second wolf pack has been euthanised whilst we wait for the enquiry into the killing of the pack in…
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Holly Blues, SSSIs and Birdwatch
I’ve been seeing quite a number of tiny blue butterflies in the garden and around the village. They are most likely Holly Blues, also or previously known as Wood Blues, Azure Blues or Blue Speckt Butterflies with Black Tips. Only the females have black borders to their wings. They are apparently fairly common in the…
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Oilseed Rape, RPSB, Golden Eagles, Sam West birdwatching, Pied Wagtails, Protect the Wild Swifts, Trail Hunting and Glue Traps, Madagascar – Chameleons and Lemurs, Star Trek, Dad’s Army, The Assembly and Starmer
Oilseed Rape I wondeređ what this plant was when it appeared growing from the foot of a nearby wall. I have noticed it growing on local road verges too. It is Oilseed Rape and is rather pretty. I assume these appearances derive from an arable farm not far away. It may be pretty but it…
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Beastly Britain, The Assembly tv show, inbred puppies, racial hatred, textile ‘recycling’, George Takei, mobile phones in galleries, business meetings, Artemis II and plenty of animal news
Beastly Britain Newts I have now finished Beastly Britain; an animal history, Yale University Press, 2025, by Karen R. Jones. There was much for me to learn from the chapter on newts, not least the etymology of their name from Old English efte or ewte, which explains why we refer to the young as efts. They…
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Various birds, wolves, maths and NASA
Dunnocks Bird of the day is the Dunnock. There are always at least two in the garden. I have said many times how underrated their complex and beautiful plumage is. I cannot imagine why both of the garden bird books (both publications from the British Trust for Ornithology) I have been drawing from of late…
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Hedgehogs, Wolves, Dogs, Foxes and Bruce Springsteen
Wolves Firstly, a couple of follow-ups. I wrote recently about the wolves at Wildwood: Still on the subject of canines, the five wolves kept at Wildwood Discovery Park in Kent have been killed since they had begun to attack and wound each other. I expect they were driven mad by their captivity. The first two…
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Mink, dogs, wolves and birds
Lovely to see the Marsh Marigolds, above, making their annual appearance. Mink The Hunt Saboteurs remind us that the mink hunting season is about to begin: Mink Hunting season due to begin. If the population does need controlling in some form, which is arguable, it should not be done like this – with dogs, drainage…
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A Chaffinch, planning this year’s bike trip and animal rescue
A Chaffinch was the first bird of today. Like Dunnocks, they are ground feeders. Their nests are described as neat, deep cups. Numbers here are more or less doubled by migrants in winter. When they are a part of a mixed flock with Bramblings there is no competition for food since Bramblings can take larger…
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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…
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Dirty water; the Chagos Islands
Dirty Business I have now finished George Monbiot’s How Did We Get Into This Mess?: Politics, Equality, Nature, Verso, 2016, and have run out of superlatives. We are now seeing evidence of grossly exaggerated forms of the kinds of corruption, especially corporate corruption, which he exposed a decade ago. In ‘Highland Spring’ he discusses land…
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Badger sett survey February 2026
I would go so far as to say that our survey yesterday was joyful. Signs of spring abounded: snowdrops, daffodils, crocuses and birdlife (although not so much birdlife as one would wish). Best of all was to feel the sun on our skins after so long in grey, dreary wetness. Surpisingly the ground was mostly…
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British Wildlife Magazine December 2025
Volume 37 number 3 Tim King writes an update to a piece from almost twenty years ago about Yellow Meadow Ants, who are featured on the cover. They are fascinating biodiversity boosters. I have a quibble. Tim describes them as “ecosystem engineers”, going on to say that the term has been debased by some to…
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The Last Elephants, part III
The Last Elephants, compiled by Don Pinnock and Colin Bell, Hardie Grant Books, 2019. The photographs are again from Tanzania. Before returning to the book, some more about the extraordinary, diminutive Lek Chailert and her Elephant Nature Park in Northern Thailand as can be seen in the video below. 🐘 Sanctuary – Elephant Nature Park (2022)…
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The Last Elephants, part II
The Last Elephants, compiled by Don Pinnock and Colin Bell, Hardie Grant Books, 2019. The photographs are again from Tanzania. ‘A tale of two elephants, working out elephant management in a private reserve’ constitutes chapter 6 and it’s another which brought tears to my eyes although I don’t much like the word ‘management’ in the context.…
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The Last Elephants, part I
The Last Elephants, compiled by Don Pinnock and Colin Bell, Hardie Grant Books, 2019. I have had this book for a long time and don’t know why I haven’t got to it before – possibly I worried that it would be depressing and heart-breaking (the title is less than optimistic) but that turns out to…
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Snowdrops, Squirrels, Beavers, Tice’s Meadow and McDonald’s, a monkey lab is to close, and Tony Blair seems to be up to no good again
Lunch at the nearby Elcot Retreat yesterday which was a bit of a curate’s egg but it gave me time and space to read two of my daughter’s excellent degree essays, ‘The Experiences of Women of Colour in Midwifery Services’ and ‘Political economies of unfree labour through a gendered global capitalist lens: Sex work in…
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Chris Packham and the North Dorset Hunt Sabs, Protect the Wild on the right to protest, Las Vegas, Mandelson and Starmer
The image above is from: Thorburn (Archibald). British Mammals. Two volumes. Longmans, Green & Co., 1920-1921. Chris Packham and his step-daughter Megan McCubbin spent five hours out with the North Dorset Hunt Sabs on a rather grey and wet day following and monitoring the notorious Blackmore and Sparkvale Hunt (BSV). They and the sabs refused…
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Crosswords, Rupert Brooke and Jeffrey Archer, AI, zoos in trouble, the Environmental Investigation on Whaling, news from the Hare Preservation Trust and Mark Kermode on ‘Melania’ the movie
Images in this post are from: Thorburn (Archibald). British Mammals. Two volumes. Longmans, Green & Co., 1920-1921. I have now finished Pretty girl in crimson rose (8), a memoir of love, exile and crosswords by Sandy Balfour and it has been a delight throughout. The last few chapters include examples of what might be called…
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HS2, Starmer, bird flu
HS2 There is an incident in the episode of Landman (with the ever excellent Billy Bob Thornton) which I watched yesterday in which people and the feral pigs they were hunting with assault rifles are killed by a gas leak. The gas is identified as HS2. I didn’t know what that was so looked it…
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Elephant rescues, fox hunting, trees, Peter Mandelson, and Kuala Lumpur house keys
Elephants Two more Thai elephant rescues to bring tears to your eyes. We first see all three elephants in chains, two of them repeatedly swaying their heads in stereotypical behaviour indicating depression and despair caused by their confinement and cruel mistreatment. That behaviour continues but dwindles during the long journeys to the wonderful Lek Chailert’s…
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Pheasant shooting – the insanity
The image above is from Gould (John). The Birds of Great Britain, 1862-1873. A lively debate in the pub last night on a subject I often try to avoid or change because I tend to get overheated to say the least. Of the four people involved two were completely against me, one didn’t say much,…
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Avatar
Yesterday I finally watched Avatar, the movie released in 2009 which I had avoided on the basis of extremely mixed reviews from friends. The driver was surprising – George Monbiot. I have been continuing with his book of articles for The Guardian (see previous posts), mostly through the section dealing with the super-rich, the ‘pollutocrats’,…
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Van Gogh
Winchester Science Centre, which opened in 2002: I very rarely use AI on my photos, hardly ever in fact, but I did here to remove the parked cars from the foreground because who wants to look at those? AI is brilliant for this. I confess it was very useful for perfectly translating the bookseller’s description…
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Dogs, manuscripts and ephemera
I’ve realised I can set my watch by the Great Spotted Woodpecker. She arrives each morning between 10.20 and 10.25 and feeds for about five minutes. Mostly, the smaller birds hang back but not one brave Great Tit who joined the GSW at the feeder this morning. The photo shows her with her tail curved…
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Sly Dunbar, Rest in Power
It is impossible to overstate the importance of drummer Sly Dunbar and bassist Robbie Shakespeare in the story of Jamaican music. The Riddim Twins played with and / or produced songs and albums by just about every reggae artist around. These are just some of them: Peter Tosh, Culture, The Mighty Diamonds, Dennis Brown, Gregory…
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Nature loss, the ogre in charge, police and border officers, dairy farming, headlights and parking, phone culture, and stained glass
Nature loss – not good says DEFRA “Nature loss is a national security risk, intelligence group warns”. The DEFRA (DEATHRA) report according to the BBC states that “The decline in the health of nature around the world poses a threat to the UK’s security and prosperity.” The document warns of “cascading risks” from the degradation…
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Birds and a squirrel, more from ‘Pretty girl in crimson rose (8)’, travels in Sweden and Turkey and an alarming plane stopover in Russia, wildlife art, the monster across the pond
The Grey Squirrel has been at the feeder for ages this morning, really feasting on the peanuts. As I headed to the summerhouse I suddenly realised he or she was wonderfully close to me and had not heard me coming. When awareness of my presence did come, there was no panic or rush to get…
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Pretty girl in crimson rose (8)
Pretty girl in crimson rose (8), a memoir of love, exile and crosswords, by Sandy Balfour, Atlantic Books, 2004. A lovely phone call which made my day yesterday from a client who was especially pleased with a book he had ordered (Twelve Sonnets, by George Faludy, translated by Robin Skelton, Pharos Press, Victoria, British Columbia, 1983,…
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More George Monbiot, Birdwatch
George Monbiot’s How Did We Get Into This Mess?: Politics, Equality, Nature, Verso, 2016, continues to shine. In ‘Civilisation is Boring’ his prose really takes flight, soars and sings. He quotes the pioneering conservationist Aldo Leopold: “One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds ……
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MBR Acres acquittal, Brian May & Glastonbury, Cobalt, Orca dialects, Carden International Circus
Food elsewhere is no doubt scarce as the cold weather continues to bite, so there is as much varied bird life in the garden as there ever is. In just the last ten minutes I have seen no fewer than six Jackdaws, a pair of Greenfinches (not seen for a while), a Chaffinch, Robins, Blackbirds,…
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The Bayeux Tapestry, AI and Only Connect, George Monbiot on Lost Youth
-3.6 Celsius in the summerhouse this morning. I even had trouble getting in since the bolt on the door was frozen solid. Slowly it is warming up. The iced spider web above really stands out against the ivy and the fence – I much prefer this weather to the grey, rainy gloom of yesterday. The…
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Gordon Buchanan and Me; flea treatments for domestic animals; Peregrine Falcons, the illegal trade; George Monbiot
The image above is of a hand-coloured lithograph from Audubon’s Viviparous Quadrupeds of North America, 1845-1848. I have pretty strong preferences when it comes to tv wildlife presenters. Ones I like and respect include Chris Packham, Liz Bonnin, Hamza Yassin, David Lindo and Steve Backshall. I despise the fraudulent Bear Grylls and my aversion to…
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RSPB Magazine & BTO News
RSPB Winter/Spring 2026 Chief executive Beccy Speight enjoys the “gentle purring” of Turtle Doves in Italy and takes from it a call to action and Yellowhammers are on the rise at RSPB’s Hope Farm. In both cases a primary factor in downturns has been intensive agricultural practices leading to a decline in wildflower seeds on…
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Birdwatch, Thylacine extinction, Penguins in prison, HS2, Pheasants and Woodcock, Ticks
Above, a little celebration of snow in the garden. The other photos in this post are from a folder on my PC which I had forgotten and were taken in 2018. I used a trailcam a lot then and seem mostly to have recorded squirrels, but I had not remembered the visits of a Jay.…
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Hercules the Bear
My only new year resolution is to get a new prescription for my glasses, long overdue. It is such an expense though (with a spare pair plus sunglasses) that I have been deferring it for over a year. The mornings of the second and third days of the year were spent unblocking a drain and…
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Annunciation
Annunziata Rees-Mogg, brother of Jacob, has made an announcement. Her name is Italian for annunciation, usually taken to refer to the appearance of the archangel Gabriel to the Virgin Mary. As if that family did not already have enough of a sense of its own importance. People who want to see an end to trail…
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Open borders
Something to which humanity might aspire rather than celebrate closing? With a nod to Zack Polanski, and my dear, late brother Willmie, this is my thought for Christmas Day (“Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free”) – Imagine there’s no heavenIt’s easy if you tryNo hell below usAbove us,…
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British Wildlife Magazine November 2025 and Labour’s animal welfare proposals
Volume 37 number 2 Cath Jeffs opens this issue asking whether European Wildcats might return to south-west England. They were declared functionally extinct in the UK in 2019 but there are ongoing efforts to restore a population in Scotland. They are a different species from Domestic Cats. They are larger, have thicker fur, a banded,…
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Empathy and gratitude; foxes, raptors, swans, cows, deer, legal matters and more
The Kennet & Avon Canal played a large role in my year and my enjoyment of the summer in particular. The photo above and two of those below were taken in the cold winter of 2010 when the canal partly froze over. Wildlife rescue in the face of wildlife persecution A World We No Longer…
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Thames Water, Open Cages, Foxhunting, Rachel Reeves, and more Wildlife
The image above and those that follow are from the beautiful setting for food and drink after a funeral we attended last week for the father of a friend, The Old Mill just outside Aldermaston. It was a powerfully moving Catholic service and although I am not religious I do rather like the High Church…
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Ben Elton; the ex-prince and the royal art collection; good and bad news for nature
I have recently finished Ben Elton’s autobiography and enjoyed it very much – he is at the very least always easy to read. He was at Manchester University not long before me and as students we adored The Young Ones. He has of course been extraordinarily prolific and I read several of his many novels…