Feed aggregator
Country diary: ringing the changes in the bird population
Bedgebury Pinetum, Kent Checked and weighed by surer hands than mine, I felt the hollow-boned weightlessness of a blue tit in the cup of my palm
There’s something extraordinary about holding a bird in the palm of your hand. For me, out bird-ringing with volunteers from the British Trust for Ornithology one brisk November morning, it was a blue tit. It had been checked and weighed by surer hands than mine and then placed delicately in the cup of my palm. A familiar bird transformed by such proximity. I felt the hollow-boned weightlessness of it, the fast-fluttering life that sat there for a moment, looking around with black-bead eyes. Its feathers were iridescent in the low slant of the winter sun. Then it was gone, up into the trees, and it was as if I’d lost something precious.
We were at Bedgebury Pinetum in Kent just after dawn. It was a blustery day and the pines soughed and sighed, the resident ravens cronking overhead. High in the canopy were hawfinches and crossbills, birds that twitchers come from miles to see. We had set mist nets near the pinetum’s eastern edge, up above the lily pond. These nets are so fine as to appear transparent to the birds, who fly into soft pockets and are gently dandled until they can be extracted, ringed and measured.
Continue reading...Graphic Japanese whaling footage released after five-year legal battle – video
WARNING: this footage may distress some readers.
Footage released by activist group Sea Shepherd shows Japanese fishermen harpooning whales in the Southern ocean before dragging them, still alive, along the side of the vessel. The publication of the video follows a five-year legal battle with the Australian government to make the images public. The footage was filmed in 2008 by Australian customs officials and requests from Sea Shepherd in 2012 for the film were denied by the government amid fears it would damage international relations. Sea Shepherd’s managing director, Jeff Hansen, said: ‘The Australian government has chosen to side with the poachers instead of defending the whales of the Southern ocean.’
Continue reading...Vestas Names Peter Cowling as Country Head and VP, Sales for Australia and New Zealand
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In defence of dowsing to detect water | Letters
Re your article “Water firms admit they still use ‘medieval’ dowsing rods” (22 November): in the 1950s, our family lived on a farm in an isolated part of northern Somerset. The farmer submitted an application for planning permission to build two new houses in a field, including details of water supply and drainage (there were no mains services at all). He had already walked over the field with his L-shaped birch twig, and we watched as the point of the L creaked downwards in his hands as he walked over a spot he had marked on the ground. A man from the water board arrived and looked at the site with geological maps. After half an hour he said “it’s anyone’s guess”, went back to his van and brought back his own birch twig. When he walked across the mark, the point of the L creaked upwards in his hands. He said that was the right place to dig a well, which the farmer and my father dug, and it never dried up.
I believe that when dowsers were tested many years ago, they were taken to a field under which was an underground reservoir. None of them located water. The farmer in Somerset told us that his own technique of dowsing only locates running water, so the reservoir would not have been indicated by this method.
Continue reading...How bats keep an ear on their prey
EU settles dispute over major weedkiller glyphosate
Controversial glyphosate weedkiller wins new five-year lease in Europe
EU votes to reauthorise the pesticide, ending a bitterly fought battle that saw 1.3 million people sign a petition calling for a ban
Glyphosate, the key ingredient in the world’s bestselling weedkiller, has won a new five-year lease in Europe, closing the most bitterly fought pesticide relicensing battle of recent times.
The herbicide’s license had been due to run out in less than three weeks, raising the prospect of Monsanto’s Roundup disappearing from store shelves and, potentially, a farmers’ revolt.
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