Downgatebatman

  HANGING INSULATED BAT BOXES.   Back in 1994 I set up 15 conventional wooden bat boxes, hung three to a tree, in a valley-bottom, mixed deciduous woodland that Cornwall Wildlife Trust owns in East Cornwall. I’d no clear idea of the purpose other than to see what bats might be there. It was good old woodland so I didn’t expect to get many bats in the boxes as I thought they would prefer the opportunities offered by the habitat. (In those days we generally only had heterodyne detectors, so acoustic surveying wasn’t as sophisticated as it is now.) But then I advertised the annual October inspection among my friends in a natural history group I was involved with, as well as our Cornwall Bat Group. So I was able to demonstrate wild bats in the hand. This morphed into training sessions for prospective volunteer bat roost visitors. And in 2010 I added another annual inspection in May.   A bottom-opening, cubic wooden box with Brown Long-eared Bats.   Take-up ...

WHAT’S IN A NAME? I saw a beautiful little ringed plover the other day. It was beautiful; it was little; it was ringed; and I know it was a plover. But even another birder wouldn’t be sure what I saw. Because there is both a Ringed Plover and a Little Ringed Plover. But they would know there isn’t a Beautiful Little Ringed Plover.   There would have been that element of doubt if I’d left out any of those capitals.   Large White: Great Black-backed Gull: Smooth-stalked Meadow Grass: Small Copper: the list is endless. But isn’t it being elitist to expect the reader to know that cream-coloured courser is the name of a species, and not the description of a bird. If you know your butterflies or your grasses you recognise the names. But what if you are a newcomer, a beginner. I once watched an aspiring young botanist become completely frozen out of a group of botanical recorders who were all conversing in scientific names, completely oblivious to the person who hitherto had ...

I'm afraid our fishing industry will be sold out to the EU yet again. When we went into the Common Market, the governement of the day held to 200 miles or median lines as the territorial rights to any oil. But we gave away (shared) our fishing rights in these waters back to a 3 mile limit! Oil is a finite resource, but it is the hands of a very few, very powerful companies. Fishing, on the other hand, is an infinite resource if managed properly, but it's power is divided amongst a myriad of small interests. But they represent an awful lot of local communities around our coasts, and a very large infrastructure with a correspondingly large labour force. But it counts for very little when weighed against the might of the oil lobby. Now, having "shared" the fish in "our" waters with the rest of the EU, I can't see them readily giving it back to us! You try getting a pig's snout out of a trough once it is there!