Some Days I Just Can’t Tell my Ground Squirrel from my Marmot.

Pre-covid, but not so long ago, Jen and I took a trip to Manning Park in British Columbia intending to visit upland meadows in full flower; but you know how it is with the natural world -- get your timing out by a week one way or the other, and you're either too early and there's nothing to see, or you're too late and everything's gone to seed. It's a bit like life really -- there are plenty of opportunities to miss. Living on the coast as we do, the time schedule for many natural events runs seasonally ahead of events…

Forest Dump.

For many years I travelled to interesting places to film wildlife, and would usually pointed my camera in the direction that would achieve the most agreeable results, because if I turned in the opposite direction it was often impossible to hide the impact of human activity: sometimes there would be plastic flapping in the wind on a barbed-wire fence; or a forest with its under-storey eaten bare by livestock, perhaps even a forest being felled. My job it seemed was to give a positive spin to the way the natural world looked, even when things weren't quite right. Turn the…

Death In The Morning.

October in the New Forest in Southern England is the time of the fallow deer rut and I thought this might be a good time to consider an unusual event that I witnessed exactly 20 years ago today in the early hours of the 19th October 2000. It was shaping up to be an almost perfect New Forest morning; dawn was approaching, birds were singing and there wasn't a breath of wind to disturb the air. Ideal conditions for sound recording I though, but still I picked up my camera bag from the back of the vehicle, doing my best…

DAS EMAS. BRAZIL.

Potoo: The Bird That Was Famous for 15 Seconds, but Wasn’t Really Bothered.

The Story of a Picture. The writer Lawrence Durrell once told his younger brother Gerald, that an interesting experience should never be wasted and should always find its way into his work; and the advice proved useful because Gerald Durrell would become one of the most popular writers of his generation. Certainly, he knew how to tell a good story, which encouraged me at an early age to read his travel books. Years later though there would be disappointment when I heard him say that what he had written had only been loosely based upon the truth. Naively I had…

COVID-19. Simple Arithmetic and ‘The Economy First Delusion’. PART 2.

I'd like to think that the most democratic countries have been the best at controlling COVID-19, but this would not be true, although there is no doubt that China did a great job at under reporting the severity of its outbreak, claiming that any suggestion that this was a problem originating out of China as racist. There was little about the way China reported on its outbreak that would help other countries to prepare. In the U.K. by 8th April over 60,000 had tested positive for COVID-19, with more than 7,000 deaths as a result of the virus. At the…

COVID-19. Simple Arithmetic and the ‘Economy First’ Delusion.

Although most of us now have some idea of how to behave in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic, few of us understand how 'the thing' really operates, but we can still glean information from the freely available daily figures. Unfortunately, there are also a lot of politicians who don't understand the virus very well either, despite having access to expert advice and a lot more information. One wonders if perhaps they had spoken more regularly to immunologist rather than economist, whether things would be different now, standing as we are on the pandemic side of the infection - somewhere…

A Brief History and Natural History of Coronavirus and its journey to Pandemic.

Is the Coronavirus emergency a dry run for how climate change will be dealt with in the not too distant future? If that is the case there is cause for concern. On December 31st 2019 China reported several cases of an unusual from of pneumonia in Wuhan, a port city in Hubei province. Some of those infected worked in a local fish market, which was quickly shut down. The virus responsible was a member of the coronavirus family, a new variation on a very basic plan: imperceptible to the naked eye, this tiny organism crossed over from a wild creature to…

Have 11,000 Scientist Got it Wrong on Climate Change? And the Problem of Melting Ice.

Science and Its Relationship to Climate Change: On the 40th Anniversary of the first World Climate Change Conference (Geneva 1979), a statement was published in the Journal of Bioscience, signed by 11,000 scientists advocating a curb on population growth, a halt to forest destruction, a change of attitudes to meat production, and a reduction in reliance on fossil fuels: all with the intention of combating the climate emergency. By 2016 studies indicated that 90-100% of scientists believed that climate change was real, and if climate deniers wanted confirmation of their beliefs it would be best to consult amongst the doubting 10%…

California Dreaming or Just Another Nightmare? Yosemite and the Giant Redwoods.

When my children were young, we took them on a road trip to California, driving the Pacific Highway from Los Angles to San Francisco before going east to visit Yosemite National Park. We then returned cross country to L.A. to visit Disneyland, this a thank you to the children for the terrible imposition of having to do interesting things. Although all of the information here, historical or otherwise, is written from the perspective of the present day, many of the pictures were taken during our trip. Yosemite - The Battle for Survival. In 1864 President Abraham Lincoln signed the Yosemite…

Time Is Running Out for the Old Growth Forests of the Pacific North West.

It is commonplace for leaders in tropical regions to receive criticism for their inability to conserve natural forests, but in northern temperate regions politicians have not been made so directly accountable, and the felling of swathes of grand old trees has passed largely without comment. West of the Rockies in the Pacific North West, there is a particular problem, especially in coastal regions where old growth forests have been felled without much concern for environmental consequences. The timber trade has played an important role in local economies since the arrival of Europeans and the resultant destruction of virgin forest has…