Culling could undermine the viability of the entire Norwegian wolf population, say conservationists. Photograph: Roger Strandli Berghagen

We love sheep, and sheep farmers, and shepherds, and wool, and so on. But we cannot read this without feeling more sympathy for the wolves, at this moment:

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/sep/15/uk-to-ban-fishing-from-a-million-square-kilometres-of-ocean

Government creates marine protected areas around four islands in the Pacific and Atlantic, with commercial fishing banned in some areas
One of the world’s biggest marine protected ares will be created around the Pitcairn Islands

Adam Vaughan
Thursday 15 September 2016 06.

In total, the government is creating marine protected areas around four islands in the Pacific and Atlantic, including the designation this week of one of the world’s biggest around the Pitcairn Islands.

A 840,000 sq km (320,000 sq mile) area around Pitcairn, where the mutineers of the Bounty settled, becomes a no-take zone for any fishing from this week. St Helena, around 445,000 sq km of the south Atlantic ocean and home to whale sharks and humpbacks, is now also designated as a protected area.

The foreign office said it would designate two further marine protection zones, one each around two south Altantic islands – Ascension by…

This 19 September 2016 video shows a kingfisher, a gadwall duck couple, two female mallard ducks, and a mute swan along a canal on Voorne island in the Netherlands.

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With Deepwater Wind’s Block Island energy farm in Rhode Island completed – all five turbines of it – it’s not surprising to learn that the cost of wind power, just like that of solar, is going to decline in coming years, according to industry experts. Prachi Patel reports for Conservation Magazine:

Wind energy is soaring around the world thanks to technology advances and energy policies that have reduced its cost. And things are only going to get better with prices dropping substantially by mid-century, according to a survey of 163 of the world’s leading wind energy experts. The results, published in the journal Nature Energy, suggest that the cost of electricity from wind could drop by 24–30 percent by 2030 relative to 2014 prices, and by 35–41 percent by 2050.

The key driver of this price drop? Bigger, more efficient turbines, according to the experts. Taller turbines with larger…

The NY Times reported on the discovery that giraffes are not one but four very distinct speicies

“The genetic differences between giraffes is so large that we have to in fact describe four new species,” said Axel Janke, a geneticist from the Senckenberg Biodiversity and Climate Research Center in Frankfurt. “Some of the differences were as large or larger than the differences between brown bears and polar bears.”

Read story at A Quadruple Take on the Giraffe: There are Four Species, Not One – The New York Times

Autumn has rolled into the village with more than a hint of summer in the weather but not enough to prevent the last twittering house martins from flying off to the coast. Other voices replace them however and mornings and most evenings now begin and end with robins starting to proclaim their patches after a quiet summer  of moulting. Most evening also bring the villages tawny owls out to do some early territorial and breeding calls. Perhaps the most obvious replacement for flocks of twittering martins is the quite sizeable charms of tinkling goldfinches which have appeared in the last week or so.

Everyones favourite the Goldfinch Credit: GemElle Photography – struggling to keep up via Compfightcc

The last couple of weeks have seen me take to the streets in what I hope is a new craze that will rival the ‘Pokemon  Go’ which is ‘Bat running’  which combines…

This 8 September 2016 video is about the Eurasian nuthatch. These birds live in Europe, Asia and Morocco in Africa.

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