Do visit our new reserves web pages, they’ve been given a new treatment and look great.  Here’s the link to the Dungeness page – for no better reason than our oldest reserve has been featuring a lot in this blog recently!

With spring bursting all around us, a visit to the countryside can’t fail to lift the spirts. 

The Scottish Parliament has sent a very clear signal to the developers, Peel Energy, that plans to develop a coal-fired power station at Hunterston on the Clyde should not even be on the agenda for Scotland.
 
The Scottish Government will make the final decision on the application – but the view of Parliament was clear in the results of this vote.  A majority of MSPs, including MSPs from the Greens, Labour, Liberals…

Get ready for another three-letter acronym!

MC Zed

Sounds like the latest club sensation?  Well no.  MCZs are Marine Conservation Zones.  They sound good don’t they?

They should be, they are one of the key outcomes from all the lobbying we (and that more than likely includes you) put into getting the Marine Act into law.  Well we’ve been seriously short changed. 

The criteria for the proposed MCZs don’t include…

I recently wrote an article for Life Fellows News updating the story of our work to protect the Severn estuary from damaging barrage proposals while at the same time supporting the search for more sustainable options for harnessing the power of the tides.

The newsletter has just been mailed – so if you are visiting the Saving Special Places blog for the first time, welcome.  Do have a rummage around earlier posts;…

DONG’s pull out of the project wasn’t the end of the matter at Hunterston.  A new planning application (expected today) from Ayrshire Power has prompted the following reaction from my colleague, Aedán Smith our head of planning and development in Scotland.

"This is the wrong application for the wrong site in Scotland. Ayrshire power wants to build a hugely polluting, dirty coal-fired power plant on…

The RSPB has now written requesting that Lydd Aiport’s expansion plans are called in by the Secretary of State so that they can be determined at a public inquiry.

You can do this too, and we would really appreciate your support.  You can read more about the whole case here on the web site and here on previous blogs.  To save time clicking through, I’ve reproduced the important stuff below.  Time is of the essence…

In stark contrast to Shepway District Council who voted to live under the flight path of commercial airliners last week – Mayor of London, Boris Johnson is saying he doesn’t want an airport.  His plans for a new airport in the Thames estuary have taken a turn for the worse ever since he confessed that he ‘does not want to build an airport in the Thames estuary’ on last week’s Question Time.…

I read this speech when I was feeling disappointed by the decision by Shepway District Council in Kent to approve the development of Lydd Airport – and it lifted my mood.  I’d watched the webcast from the council chamber in Folkestone into the night and you could see from the tenor of the debate that approval was the likely outcome. 

The speech was made by the new European Environment Commissioner, Janez Potocnik…

In earlier posts, we’ve followed the campaign mounted by our colleagues in Nature Kenya to protect the fabulous Tana River Delta from the combined impacts of sugar-cane and biofuels farming together with port development and titanium mining.

I’ve just been sent this article appearing in the Kenya Star newspaper which powerfully brings home the plight of the local people who are putting their future on the…

My colleagues in Wales were delighted to host a visit by MEP Derek Vaughan (pictured on the right with RSPB Conservation Manager Sean Christian) to the Newport Wetlands national nature reserve.

Mr Vaughan was impressed with the reserve’s centre – thronged with half term families – and was keen to find out more about our work to save special places.  Taking a walk onto the wider reserve, managed by…

The debate ran long into the night and eventually Shepway’s councillors voted to approve the runway extension and new terminal building.  Tthe full text of our press release issued in response to this latest stage in this long running case follows.

The RSPB, along with a huge range of other organisations and individuals, has expressed disappointment and concern at the decision by Shepway District Councillors to…

The Severn estuary (with help from it’s surfing community) has been covering the media with stunning images of one of its biggest tidal bores for years - getting a five star rating.

The Severn bore is but one of the wonders of this special place – you can read more about them here.  The Severn – along with the UK’s other great estuaries - lives to the pulse of the tides.  The ebb and flow governs…

This is a critical moment in the campaign to stop the expansion of Lydd airport, safeguard the fragile environment of Dungeness and protect the quality of life of the people who live there.  We've followed the story on this blog for a few months but the campaign is long-running and brings togther conservation organisations, community groups and individuals committed to protecting this unique environment.

Shepway District…

The spring issue of the RSPB publication Conservation Planner is just out and here is a link to the document.  As the editor has kindly included a link to this blog, it was the least I could do!  Here is the link to the loads of other newsletters that we produce.

This issue highlights the challenges posed by the failure of members of the European Union to halt the decline of biodiversity by 2010 – a commitment made back…

Way back in September, I reported on yet another delay in the saga that has been the plans to extended Lydd airport.

To recap, back in September we were anticipating Shepway District Council taking a decision on the proposal by Lydd Airport to extended their runway and boost passenger numbers from 4000 to half a million.  The RSPB has objected to this proposal from the outset because of the risks to the precious and sensitive…

Is it a good idea to have a high-speed rail link between London and Birmingham?  Simple question – so what’s the answer?  It should be yes shouldn’t it?

Along with many others – in particular the communities along the, as yet, undefined route – we await the publication of the Department for Transport’s report into High Speed 2 (HS2) which will bring much needed clarity. This report is expected towards…

Lots of posts on this blog have featured wetlands and, in particular, the UK’s coast and estuaries.  This is no coincidence – this country’s coastal heritage really puts us on the world map of conservation issues.  As we look forward to the end of winter hundreds of thousands of wildfowl and wading birds are preparing to head north to their artic breeding grounds having survived another winter on our coast…

The the idea of protecting the best places for nature on land is a familiar and accepted way of doing conservation.   The best of the best – our Natura 2000 site network – has been a success (there’s a long way to go to complete the network, but that’s another story).

The requirement to protect the best sites at sea has been there for as long as it has on land – but the UK’s approach has, until recently…

The Thames estuary and the Essex coast have appeared on these pages several times already.  The nature of this great estuary has survived in pockets and fragments alongside burgeoning human use and abuse of the place.

Robert Macfarlane’s evocation of the Wild Places of Essex on BBC 2’s Natural World last night will open eyes to a world that is waiting to be discovered (you can view it for a few days – and…

I’m just back from a briefing we organised in London.  The audience got to hear the details behind this story.  We’ve had a bit of a blog-fest on this topic today so you can read more by visiting Mark Avery’s blog and our News blog.

The pursuit of tidal power by the construction of massive barrages has occupied a lot of work by the RSPB over the last 30 years – for four years I was deeply involved in…

On World Wetlands Day we featured some of East Africa's most important (and threatened) wetlands.  You can listen, here, to the voice of Fahad Mohamed Musa - the captain of a dhow sailing out of the of island of Lamu in the delta of the Tana River.  The port development featured in this BBC audio-visual diary is but one of the threats faced by this vital wetland.

I regularly bang on about how important our protected areas are.  In particular, our Special Protection Areas and Special Areas of Conservation (together forming the European Natura 2000 network) are vital to efforts to safeguarded not just wildlife but also a range of services the natural world provides directly to us.  The jargon phrase ‘ecosystems services’ sounds like it should be on the side of a white van – but covers…

World Wetlands day falls today, Candlemas – 2 February.  A day marked in Mediaeval weather-lore ‘If Candlemas Day be fair and clear, there’ll be five winters in the year’.  Let’s hope not!

February fill-dyke, the month of snow-melt, is an appropriate time to celebrate wetlands – but the reason for the date has nothing to do with our ancestors marking the passage of time.  Today is…