It is a month now since my last posting. I am presently recovering from hip surgery and it may be many weeks before I am able to get out and about again with the camera. To keep the blog alive I am therefore publishing a few images taken before I went into hospital Apart from […]
Tag: Pheasant
POLL: Should there be a tough crack down on the killing of raptors?
Grouse moors are to blame for persecuting endangered birds of prey in the Scottish Highlands and Uplands, according to a wildlife crime expert. Ian Thomson, the head of investigations at the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds Scotland, said data from 77 birds of prey that had been satellite-tagged showed a direct correlation between […]
Red flanked Bluetail at Titchwell
A planned trip to Norfolk today had added spice with news of Titchwell’s first ever Red-flanked Bluetail staying put for a second and hopefully third day. We stopped at first light in the hope of seeing the Golden Pheasant at Wolferton but had to settle for it on call alone before we moved on to […]
The Pathological Moseyers Visit the Bog
I was in Colorado this month during the annual Sax-Zim Bog Birding Festival. It’s sad when even a lovely conflict makes me miss the wonderful local event, so on Saturday I headed to the bog with my little birding dog Pip and my friend Lisa. Earlier in the week, the forecast had called for snow […]
POLL: Should buzzards be killed to protect pheasants?
Tim Boxall points at a shape in the field bordering the seven-acre wooded pen where he keeps 1,500 pheasants. “Here you are,” he says. “Look! There’s one over here.” He bends down and prises the remains of a pheasant from the long grass. “That’s a buzzard kill, you can tell by the way it’s been […]
POLL: Should the killing of buzzards to protect pheasants be allowed?
Every year, thousands of pheasants are slaughtered by cars. What would we say if the government’s conservation watchdog issued a licence to allow a gamekeeper to shoot 10 careless motorists? Natural England has instead issued a licence to allow a gamekeeper to kill something like us: a legally protected predator, a clever, adaptable native species […]
Past The Old Tobacco Fields In Search Of Birds
I took a walk on Easter morning and passed by some old agricultural fields where I earned my first paycheck picking tobacco leaves in the late 70’s. All that remains of those days are the ghostly remains of old tobacco sheds and distant memories of tar-covered clothes. These days the fields are used for planting […]
Over 40 years, half of China’s land vertebrates disappear
From 1970 to 2010, the world’s populations of mammals, reptiles, amphibians, birds, and fish shrunk by about 52 percent. China is right in the middle of the global pack with a nearly 50-percent loss of its land-based vertebrates, according to a recent report by the international NGO World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF). The situation […]