I was on a social media platform a few weeks ago when there was a sudden flurry of excited reports about a large copper butterfly being seen. Why was that exciting? Because the Large Copper went extinct in Britain 150 years ago. Now I’ve photographed every British breeding butterfly, but I don’t have a photo of the large copper. It’s a truly beautiful butterfly, with burnished orange upperwings and spotted underwings. It’s a close relative of one of my favourite …
Category: wildlife crime
[trigger warning: this post discusses some distressing details of animal harm] You don’t have to be interested in British nature for very long before you hear the words “schedule 1”. It’s a reference to part of the Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981, the very thin piece of paper which is all that sits between Britain’s wildlife and those who wish it harm. The recent news that people from the UK were involved in a “baby monkey torture” group, paying individuals …
Regular readers will know that I love hares. A lot of people do. They have a long, often mystical, association with our countryside, being said to conjure spirits, turn into witches, and dance at the moon. The UK has three species – the brown hare, the mountain hare, and in Northern Ireland, (and one tiny part of Scotland) the Irish hare. I’ll be writing about Britain’s hare species in a future blog. To me, hares are the archetypal wild animals, …
A few days ago in Wales, persons unknown took a boat to an island in the centre of the llyn brenig reservoir in Wales and used a chainsaw to fell a new platform erected to encourage Ospreys to breed. The Ospreys, an IUCN red list bird and highly protected in the UK, had in fact just started to breed, and had laid their first egg when their home was destroyed. At the time of writing, the culprits are unknown. But …
Social Profiles