Miscellaneous

The Findhorn Foundation is hosting a major international conference on the theme of ‘Climate Change & Consciousness: Our Legacy for the Earth‘ from April 20-26 2019, and it promises to be an important and stimulating event. I’ll be participating fully in the conference, and last year I wrote a blog, ‘Canaries of the climate change coal mine‘ as part of the preparations for it. Now, with the conference less than two months away, here are my thoughts on its theme, and what the event may be able to achieve. [Read more…] about Climate Change and Consciousness

For some years I’ve been keen to visit Berriedale Wood on the island of Hoy, one of the Orkney Islands to the north of the Scottish mainland. It’s the most northerly native woodland in the UK, and is therefore of considerable ecological interest, although similar woods flourish in the southwest of Norway at comparable latitudes, and indeed much further north as well. I’d made an attempt to see Berriedale when I was last in Orkney, about 9 years ago, but there had been no space on the ferry the day had I hoped to go, so I never reached it then. [Read more…] about A day in Scotland’s most northerly native wood

Recently I was invited to write a blog about the impact of climate change on birds by the main organiser of the Climate Change and Consciousness Conference that is being held at Findhorn in April 2019. That blog is now live, and I’m publishing it here as well, with the agreement of the conference team.

Over a hundred years ago, when coal mining in the UK was producing the fossil fuels that first drove the industrial revolution, canaries were used as early warning signals for danger. One of the hazards faced by miners then was the release of toxic gases, particularly carbon monoxide, and canaries were more sensitive to them than humans. The birds were kept in cages at the coal seam face, and if they showed symptoms of sickness the miners knew it was time to evacuate, before they too succumbed to poisoning. [Read more…] about Canaries of the climate change coal mine

In early June I was invited to participate in a special three day workshop that was held on an island in the Stockholm archipelago in Sweden, with the rather unusual title of ‘Seeds of a Good Anthropocene’. This was a collaborative project organised by faculty members from McGill University in Montreal, Canada, the Stockholm Resilience Centre in Sweden and the Centre for Complex Systems in Transition at Stellenbosch University in South Africa, and was designed to develop scenarios for positive futures for humanity as we move forward in what is now being termed the Anthropocene epoch. [Read more…] about Seeds of a Good Anthropocene

On the 9th of February I spent a very interesting day with one of my colleagues, Becky Priestley, as she carried out the next phase of our newest project for the restoration of the Caledonian Forest. Becky is our Wildlife Officer and she’s working on a three year project, funded by the Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF), the People’s Trust for Endangered Species and an appeal to our supporters, for the translocation of red squirrels (Sciurus vulgaris) to suitable native forests in the northwest Highlands that are currently  missing these arboreal, bushy-tailed mammals. [Read more…] about A red squirrel translocation day

Autumn is my favourite season of the year in the Caledonian Forest, and although I spend a lot of time appreciating and photographing the bright colours of the leaves on the deciduous trees, fungi run them a close second in terms of garnering my interest. This is the time when the majority of fungi produce their fruiting bodies and I’ve long been intrigued and fascinated by the diversity and beauty of the various forms they take. [Read more…] about Fantastic fungi

This is the follow up to my previous blog, about my visit to Glasdrum Wood National Nature Reserve in Argyll at the end of July. Rather than make one very long blog, I decided to split it into two, in the interest of making it more readable, and also for my own ease of posting blogs relatively regularly. The amount of work involved in creating each blog is obviously proportional to the length of the blog, and my aim is to get two blogs posted each month, so dividing my day at Glasdrum between two has enabled me to keep to that schedule. [Read more…] about A day in Glasdrum Wood, Part 2

For quite a few years I’d been wanting to visit Glasdrum Wood, a special area of temperate rainforest that is protected as a National Nature Reserve (NNR) on the west coast of Scotland, and at the end of July I finally made a visit there. Situated about midway between Fort William and Oban, on the north shore of Loch Creran, the wood is about 3 hours by car from my home so I set off at 6 am to ensure I had enough time to explore the woodland. [Read more…] about A day in Glasdrum Wood, part 1

On Saturday 9th July I spent some time in my garden looking at an aspen tree (Populus tremula) I planted there about 10 years ago. As I was doing so, I noticed little spots of liquid on some of the leaves that I recognised as being the honeydew that is secreted by aphids when they feed on the tree’s sap. This prompted me to start looking at the leaves higher up on the tree, in search of the aphids themselves. Almost immediately, I found some large aphids on a few of the aspen’s leaves, but they didn’t look like the aphid species that I’m familiar with that feed on aspen. [Read more…] about Birth and death on a birch tree