The Nature of Farming Award is a partnership between the RSPB, Butterfly Conservation and Plantlife which recognises and celebrates the good work done by many (but not all!) UK farmers for nature on their farms.

Past winners have had a Celtic flavour: 2008, Peter Davies, Wales; 2009, Michael Calvert, Northern Ireland and 2010, John and James Davison, Northern Ireland.

Our new media partner is Telegraph newspapers - and…

I occasionally write about my visits to my local patch of Stanwick Lakes in east Northants in this blog.  It's a place which is nearby, quite good for birds and it gives me a connection with nature through the changing seasons.

In 2010 I saw 111 species of bird at Stanwick Lakes - six of them were new for my Stanwick list (whooper swan, pink-footed goose, woodcock, peregrine, ruff and bittern) - and my total bird…

One of the themes of the Oxford Farming Conference was 'more for less' (an interesting phrase which can mean an awful lot of things) or 'sustainable intensification' (an ill-defined but useful starting point).

The Secretary of State, Caroline Spelman, has been talking up the fact that HLS funding is increasing by 80% over the next few years, at this time of tight money, and that ELS funding is remaining…

The EU Agriculture Commissioner attended our breakfast event at the Oxford Farming Conference on Thursday morning.  Mr Ciolos did not say that we needed to produce more to feed the world but did say that we needed to make agriculture more sustainable.  Peter Kendall didn't look too thrilled by this.

There was some talk at the conference about Pillar 1 payments (the Single Farm Payment)  being 'Brussels' money whereas…

It's nice to be noticed, but there is no truth in the rumour that my future is in dancing!

The Oxford Farming Conference prompted plenty of thoughts that might keep this blog going from now until May!

I met NFU President Peter Kendall and the commenter on this blog who goes under the name of 'essex peasant', and they both seemed delighted to see me. 

The Secretary of State, Caroline Spelman, made a speech which it is worth reading.  It contains a lot of interesting stuff and is strong on biodiversity…

It's just fascinating.

I've heard farmers say that they want less regulation and that they want to be told what they must do.  I've heard them say that they want Pillar 1 of the CAP to be greened and that they don't.  I've heard that they want Pillar 2 to be increased and that it won't be.  I've heard that they want less government involvement and that they want extra tax relief for some sectors…

This blog is sulking because the mighty Rushden and Diamonds lost at home to local rivals Kettering.

But it's back to work and off to a minor seat of learning for the Oxford Farming Conference.

I may have got this waxwing thing cracked - maybe.

On New Year's Eve, on the outskirts of Northampton, I saw a flock of 123 waxwings.  They were sitting in the top of a tree and small groups would fly off and then they or others would return.  People were walking past on the pavement underneath and the waxwings were cool about it.  They twittered and burbled in the tree top.  Not quite the last birds I saw in 2010 but…

What more is there to say?

I'm a 'looking forwards' kind of guy, but the end of the year is a time to take stock too.

January is when the Big Garden Birdwatch takes place and last January it followed a prolonged cold spell (click here, here, here, here and here).

In February we handed in a massive 210,567 person petition to the government asking for birds of prey to retain their legal protection.

March - I am still thanking Alberta…

Tomorrow there will be a bit of a review of 2010 seen through this blog, so I've been checking what I've written over the year,

Here are a few blogs which I enjoyed re-reading and I hope you will too.  They are selected more to give you pleasure than to be of any importance at all - I hope you liked them the first time you read them (if you did) and that you like them again now.  Some at least will remind you of…

Monday's Independent carried a story about the potential disposal of National Nature Reserves.

A group of nature conservation organisations including the National Trust, the Wildlife Trusts, the Woodland Trust and the RSPB have been working together to set out our position on the government's ideas to dispose of National Nature Reserves.

We've worked on a set of principles that we feel should govern any…

This photograph was taken by Philip Giles from the Peacock Tower of the WWT's London Wetland Centre this August. 

It shows a corncrake - Philip's first ever! - in a heron's beak.

How amazing!  I would say there is practically no chance that you would see a corncrake at this site even if there were several of them skulking around in the grass (which there almost certainly never are!).  So for a heron to catch…

Bird is the word got to No 3 in the Christmas charts and we had a 'thank you' email from Dal Winslow of The Trashmen thanking the RSPB - and that means you! - for our support. He described it as '...just awesome!'. 

It was fun - what next?

A group of just over 20 birders met for a walk at Stanwick Lakes yesterday morning at 9am.  It was -6C but a sunny day.

Our leader, local birder Bob Webster, organised us for a brisk walk around the frozen lakes where the best birds were some yellowhammers and bramblings on some game cover and a woodcock and red kite.

It was a lovely sunny day and walking kept us warm.

I took the opportunity to give Bob a badge to mark…

FAME!

'I'm gonna live forever
I'm gonna learn how to fly'

Aren't birds amazing? Yes they are!

This is the track of a kittiwake that flew 231km, almost half way to Norway, to look for food to feed to its chicks in a colony in Orkney. 

Each dot on the map is a location recorded by the GPS tag which gets a fix every 100 seconds to an accuracy of between 5 and 15 metres. The points are coloured b…

It was -8C at 0730 this morning but a collared dove was nonetheless singing outside our house.

I guess if 21 December is the shortest day then we are well into spring now!

In which EU country are people most concerned about biodiversity loss in their own country?  Greece

Do the people of Italy, Germany, France or the UK take global biodiversity loss the most seriously? Italy

What are the strongest reasons, according to the EU public, for protecting nature? A moral imperative

Which EU country has the highest proportion of its inhabitants claiming to make personal efforts to save biodiversity…

It will not have escaped regular readers of this blog that it is an exceptional winter for waxwings in the UK - much larger numbers than usual have been seen and they arrrived early in the autumn.

Reports have come in from much of Scotland, the north and east of England, north Wales and Northern Ireland.   My daughter saw some by the frozen canal in Preston, they have been seen at The Lodge several times, they were seen…

It's very nearly Christmas. 

And all through the year you have been giving us Christmas presents!

• RSPB membership stands at a record 1,076,112
• The bird of prey campaign raised a record-breaking 210,567 signatures in favour of legal protection for birds of prey.
• Big Garden Bird Watch involved nearly 530,000 people who recorded 73 species in 280,000 gardens across the UK. Extraordinarily cold weather led to more…

Thanks for interesting comments on the extinction blogs of the past few days.

And I'm grateful to one of my colleagues for pointing me in the direction of this EU survey of what EU residents think about biodiversity.  It's an interesting read (although a little out of date - from 2007).  But if you don't want to read it, then here are a few questions to test your guessing power and the answers will appear on Christmas…

Today's blog has been cancelled because of the wrong type of ice on the keyboard.

Several species have gone extinct in my garden today but then have recolonised naturally.  Yes, that's a daft thing to say because the smaller the area the more likely a species is to disappear and then return.  Extinction in my garden is trivial, extinction on the planet is much less so.  But where do you draw the line?

An excellent example of using more local extinctions in a very good way to make a point is the Plantlife…

I'll never see a great auk and that's a shame.  It's just one species that was pretty common on this planet, on both sides of the Atantic, and then was driven to extinction by our own species.  There were millions of great auks, but now there is not a single one. So, I will never see a great auk, and neither will anyone else. 

It's a good example of shifting baselines.  None of us grew up with great auks…