Preserving Our Biosphere – A Tribute to Edward O Wilson I had the new experience yesterday evening of reading a book by someone I thought was alive that same morning but had found, during the day, that they’d died. Reading on, it was unsettling, upsetting, and made their urgent plea all the more urgent. As …
A winter’s tale – the last true penguin? December 1852, sailing home for Christmas, a highly respected ornithologist spotted what he believed to be a penguin off the coast of Newfoundland. The lone bird is widely believed to be the last sighting of the last true penguin. Was it or wasn’t it? Was it a …
Can Santa’s Reindeer save the Titanic world; the world as we knew it?– We think so “History makes little sense without prehistory, and prehistory makes little sense without biology. Knowledge of prehistory and biology is increasing rapidly, bringing into focus how humanity originated and why a species like our own exists on this planet.” Edward …
A brief story of the Steller’s Sea Cow The world of the Steller’s sea cow is something we only know from the written descriptions of a castaway. A Scientist on an expedition Our hero, and part-villain, Georg Steller was a German scientist on a Russian expedition to the western coast of north America. They would be …
The Wildlife Garden This plea to anyone and everyone to make their garden wildlife friendly rides on the back of my usual mantra about extinction. It rarely happens in big obvious and rapid catastrophes. It happens all around us, so slowly that we get used to it. First a species disappears from a garden, a …
World Bee Day Today, 20th May 2020, is world Bee Day, so it feels like a good day to talk about bees and other pollinators. Flowers and Fruit Most of us like flowers in some way or other and most of us like fruit in some form or other too. Most of the fruits and …
Glutinous Snail Updates How it all began Like school boys with marbles my old friend Pat Wisniewski and I would discuss, with excitement the possibility of establishing a conservation breeding project for the extremely rare glutinous snail; Europe’s rarest freshwater snail. Considered extinct in Germany, Austria and Poland as well as in England; restricted, in …
Introduction To Neil Garrick Maidment It is an honour to introduce our latest guest blogger, Neil Garrick-Maidment – Executive Director of the Seahorse Trust. I have worked occasionally with Neil since the mid-2000s and knew of him long before then as a Dr. Dolittle of seahorses, although it was success with other species that led …
Call him Ishmael… Just as our killer whale rises from the ocean, I have divided this article, loosely, into: sinking, rising emerging and zenithing to metaphorically explore a relationship with Orcinus orca. I grew up knowing them as killer whales, I liked that they were killers, and I tend to call them that. Many people …
