Blogs

Spring has well and truly arrived over the last few weeks. The hillsides are a lot noisier with the return of curlew and lapwing. The black grouse are less in need of shelter with the weather cheering up, so sightings in the woodlands have dropped off, but there’s plenty of other animals to distract us whilst we’re out.

It has been a whirlwind of a placement year and I am grateful to have taken part in such fun research. The Uplands Team is fantastic, and I would recommend this placement, or job role, to anyone who has the opportunity to do it.

There has been much written in scientific journals about how conservation is influenced by changing values and beliefs, and the increasingly held view that animals and humans are equal sentient beings resulting in compassionate conservation approaches and ultimately calls for animal personhood. This results in concerns about the management of some species, such as when controlling predators or pests. But are these values and attitudes applied to all animals equally?

On 30th May GWCT Newsround reported on a think piece by Hong Jiang a PhD student at York University which asked how we achieve the expansion of protected areas and other effective area-based conservation measures (OECM) in line with the ambitions of COP15 and the new post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF). The GBF commits to 23 action-orientated targets by 2030.

Many parts of the English rolling landscape are criss-crossed by hedgerows, which if one stops and looks provide an interesting perspective on the history of the landscape being observed.

The British Beekeepers’ Association (BBKA) is calling on the public to help fight a major threat to honey bees and other pollinators - Asian hornets.

I recently read Jeff Knott’s blog on the RSPB website – “There’s something very special about the uplands” – and I couldn’t agree more with the title. But on reading the rest of the blog, I felt obliged to respond. Not to reinforce the ‘contested landscape’ notion but to ask for a bit more tolerance. Just because you might not agree with someone’s viewpoint it doesn’t mean they are wrong, and you are right.

There’s a row broken out in the Garden of Eden. Apparently, we must cease our assiduous nurturing of our horticultural havens and allow nature to do a Brexit and “take back control”. Yes, you’ve guessed, the Rewilders have your lawns in their sights!

Countryfile viewers were treated to a captivating glimpse into the world of nest monitoring during Sunday's episode.

In April 2023, the Lowland Gamebird research group finished a full year of walking 3km transect routes across a number of sites every three weeks, looking for fox scats and recording wildlife sightings.