A climate-friendly aproach to ornithology
By Joe Parham In October 2020 I was appointed a Youth Representative of the British Trust for Ornithology, with the goal of increasing access to and knowledge of birds among young people across the country. Pondering how I might initiate this, I thought that green patch birding would be worth promoting—it is an accessible form …
Fifty autumn postcards from forty birdwatchers—a fraction of the growing number of individuals who are thinking more carefully about why, where, and how they travel to watch birds. As these accounts show, there is no single or perfect way of understanding and doing low-carbon birding. Some of these birdwatchers live in bird-rich places, others in …
By Robert Fletcher, Bram Büscher, Kate Massarella and Stasja Koot Among the pandemic’s most significant effects has been its impact on the global tourism industry – an important source of conservation financing in many places. In some places, this is affecting wildlife directly. For instance, fears that endangered mountain gorillas might contract the virus from …
Continue reading "Time to rethink ecotourism and conservation"
By Tom Jordan The idea of the car as the default mode of transport is embedded in modern society and birding is no exception. Can this culture be changed? By questioning our defaults, many birders will be surprised at what can be achieved. Apart from birding, my other great love is Southampton Football Club. As …
By Steve Dudley There appears to be some debate among conservationists and environmentalists about what we should be prioritising—the climate or biodiversity. For me it’s clear. There will be no biodiversity without a planet, so climate change remains the biggest threat to all life on Earth. Our planet’s biodiversity is ultimately tied to the planet’s …
By Charlie Peverett Finding your own rarities close to home is often considered peak birding, but there’s another summit worth scaling and it’s coming closer into view. As many of us have found in 2020, local green spaces are precious and can be full of surprises. I live in the middle of a town in …
Continue reading "Bringing back the birds: the next level of patch gold"
By Jonnie Fisk Birding trips abroad are a high-carbon indulgence. But that can be cut down by quite some margin by ditching air travel. I spent two weeks on Europe’s winter rails to show that productive, fulfilling and affordable birding can be had without the need for a plane or car. In January 2019 I …
By Jonathan Dean “Keep the politics out of birding”: it’s a familiar lament which anyone active on birding twitter will likely have come across at some point. Such sentiment is understandable. Politics can be fractious, tense and divisive, while birding is something we do for fun, to relax from the stresses of everyday life (well, …
By Nick Acheson Life is all about irony; nowhere more so than in our relationship with nature. In the UK we cast ourselves as nature-lovers when — demonstrably, if we would only stop to look — we have harried nature so successfully from the landscape that she cowers only in forgotten corners. There’s a double …
By Tim Allwood A family holiday to North Norfolk in the 1980s sowed the seeds of what has become a lifetime addiction to birding. I was allowed to wander the reserve at Cley on my own, and remember being mesmerised by the amount of waders beetling around on the scrapes there. The presence of a …
Low-Carbon Birding 