You are going to participate in Big Garden Birdwatch this weekend aren't you?
Fisheries and almost-everything-else Minister, Richard Benyon, is coming under pressure from fellow fishermen to allow culling of cormorants in their breeding season. We work closely with fishermen on a range of issues such as the Severn Barrage, river pollution and the Water Framework Directive but some of them are a bit bonkers. No you don't need extra powers to cull cormorants - you have plenty of unnecessary scope already. We hope that in his busy job, Mr Benyon has time to be sensible on this issue.
Forests - we'll hear soon of the government's actual plans on this subject. We will be scrutinising the consultation paper carefully and then making our views known. The timing of this article in the Independent cannot be accidental.
Waxwings - look out for colour-ringed birds. I see that some of the local Northamptonshire birds are carrying colour-rings clamped onto them by the Grampian Ringing Group earlier in the winter.
I'm looking forward to talking at the Sussex Ornithological Society Conference this weekend - but the other speakers on the programme are excellent so I'm looking forward to listening too.
A love of the natural world demonstrates that a person is a cultured inhabitant of planet Earth.
Surely the issue of culling cormorants is a total "red herring"!(sorry about that terrible pun). As I noted in my late comment on your blog yesterday Mark, the plain fact is that there has been and continues to be gross over fishing of our seas and other waters by the fishing industry as well as a total lack of meaningful policing of their activities. The current state of our seas demonstrates that. That very degraded state is not due to cormorants, which have been around for thousands of years in coexistence with very healthy seas and waters, before the fishing industry wreaked its havoc. I am afraid the fishermen asking for a cull of cormorants is more a case of trying to squeese just a little bit more out of an ever declining resource and habitat at the expense of nature. The answer is to suspend all fishing, let nature recover first and then fish on a sustainable basis, not an unsustainable one.
redkite