• Shermans, Slugs and the “Wee, sleekit, cow’rin, tim’rous beastie”

    Thundry Meadows, Surrey: SWT  Harvest Mice Survey Day 2 I am prepared to deal with most things I would find in a small mammal trap but this morning, still only half awake, I was not ready for the two enormous slugs that had taken up residence in the Sherman trap. They lay side by side along…

  • Some thoughts on resilience in natural and human landscapes

    Fragmentation affects people as well as landscapes. Connectivity is  important for personal resilience as much as it is for biodiversity in a landscape. Isolation can lead to the extinction of an individual as much as a species. Isolation of a species in a woodland for instance can be mitigated by increasing connectivity by planting hedgerows. For people, connections need to…

  • Hedgerow heaven

  • The way forward for biodiversity conservation in England?

    Last week I attended a stakeholder consultation group for the development of the new England Biodiversity Strategy http://www.ukbap.org.uk/EBG/england_biodiversity_strategy.asp. The new EBS is due to be published in April and this was a chance for a small group of stakeholders-people form conservation NGOS, farming and countryside groups and professional ecologists-to offer their views on parts of…

  • The Hedgerows and Curries project…and dormice in their somewhere too!

    Sunday night and I’m sat in a plush B&B in Tetbury, Gloucestershire with the rain lashing at the windows.  It hasn’t stopped to day- it was even a tough choice to decide on whether to drive up the M4 or sail! Tomorrow I’m leading another Hedgerows for Dormice Hedge Management Workshop this time at Duchy…