This weekend, I plan to forget all about the triennial review of government agencies, wildlife crime, the fate of European environment legislation and funding for wildlife friendly farming. I'm not even going to worry about climate change.
I'm going to grab a coffee, get a couple of chairs and sit with my kids for an hour looking out of a window into our garden.
And then we'll wait and wait and wait...
...and with a bit of luck some birds will turn up.
I'll test the kids of their bird ID and we'll count how many of each species appear. They might get distracted by lego or need a biscuit every now and then, but that's ok.
We'll end up filling in a form (in the girl's best handwriting) to recrod the largest number of each species we see at any one time.
We'll do this for an hour.
And it will be brilliant.
We'll be doing this because...
...it's Big Garden Birdwatch Weekend.
If you're doing it this weekend, have a great hour. It's time well spent. And if you're not, why not?
P.S. If at any point during your hour, the birds disappear and your mind wanders a bit, you might want to ask yourself this question - what on earth was the European Parliament Agriculture Committee thinking this week? Read this to understand why this has been a bad week for European wildlife.
Martin ---lots of confusion as your link just takes me it appears to think it is Jenny Haggerty's thoughts and it seems rather the usual everything is wrong with it as it does not fit what she would like.Really it seems to me that nothing the EU and farmers do will please some at the RSPB.
I would appreciate it if instead of a personal opinion facts were put on here for us to see the bad points.
In the meantime I found what appeared to be approximately 28 of the European Parliament Agriculture Committees proposals and to my utter astonishment considering what Jenny had written every one seemed really good(of course whether they have the will to implement them is a different matter)
Will be very interested in knowing everything that is wrong with these proposals then we can make our own decisions.