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Drinking water at Stansted Airport

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The lack of a water fountain in the main departure lounge at London Stansted Airport continues to bug me. I went through there recently, with Honeyguide’s Picos de Europagroup, and again there was no public water fountain to re-fill water bottles after security.
Stansted Airport advises that catering outlets will fill water bottles, which from my experience is true. The kind people at Pret a Manger did this for me and other Honeyguiders, with such speed and charm that it suggests the request is likely and expected. But how many others would think to ask? That service is not advertised.
Why does it matter? It could be argued that access to drinking water is a basic human need. But for me it’s all about reducing single use plastic. It’s easy to buy bottled water from any number of retail outlets. That won’t stop, but access to a fountain or tap would reduce the volume of plastic water bottles sold and used once.
You’d have to deaf and blind not to realise that single use plastic is an env…
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Bee orchids bounce back

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Regular readers will know that I keep a regular eye on some bee orchids that grow outside Big Yellow Self Storage on Canary Way, opposite Norwich City FC’s football ground.

I made my regular visit to count them on 7th June 2019. A rather gloomy day was brightened by counting 42 flowering spikes of bee orchids. Last year they’d dwindled in number to less than ten, and I feared it was the beginning of the end for them. Not so: more the end of the beginning as The Meadow in the Citygoes into a new phase.
In the early years, the bee orchids were on the grass opposite the football ground. Now most of them are growing around the corner. It helps that this year the Big Yellow team has organised that all the grass around two sides of the warehouse-like building has remained uncut. Credit where credit is due: there was reluctance to do this when I first broached the subject in 2009, but now I don’t even have to remind them. Even without the orchids it’s a delight: bumblebees were collecting nect…
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Forty Years of the EU’s Birds Directive

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Forty Years of the EU’s Birds Directive
In April, there was a notable anniversary for all nature conservationists. It was 40 years since the European Union’s Birds’ Directive, the first environmental legislation from the EU and still a cornerstone of nature conservation.
More formally this is the ‘Council Directive 2009/147/EC on the conservation of wild birds.’ It is best known for setting up a network of Special Protection Areas (SPAs, as we call them in the UK). It also gives obligations to protect and conserve habitats for 194 species and subspecies, listed under Annex 1: bitterns, pelicans, terns and many birds of prey are just a few of these; passerines are often those with restricted distribution, such as semi-collared flycatcher and trocaz pigeon.
The agreement of the ‘Birds Directive’ in April 1979 coincides with my own career in nature conservation. I arrived at the RSPB’s HQ in the second half of 1978. The UK’s nature legislation had to be improved to implement the Birds Dire…
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Beetlemania

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It was an invitation too good to miss. Martin Collier, Norfolk’s beetle recorder, had heard about NWT Thorpe Marshes and was keen to visit the reserve to see what he could find. Could I show him around? Writing Christmas cards was postponed and the inevitable family conversations about beetle drives and popular beat combos from Liverpool were put to one side. It was a bright December morning when I joined Martin and recording colleague Steve Lane on the marshes. Beetle records on the reserve to date have been mostly relatively big, bright species on summer flowers. Surely an icy day in December was far from promising?  How wrong that was. The key technique was a fistful of damp marsh vegetation, often from a ditch edge, shaken through a coarse mesh sieve into a white bowl. The volume of invertebrates, once you had your eye in, was remarkable. Most were tiny: beetles of various shapes, almost microscopic harvestmen, pseudoscorpions. I photographed and noted names of bigger species; a lo…
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Here comes the elephant (inspired by Namibia)

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Here comes the elephant
For anyone missing the regular Namibia blogs, here's a little poem by Christopher Durdin, aged about 62½, inspired by elephants at waterholes in Namibia, November 2018. I had a little trouble with rhymes, which you might be able to help with (not necessarily out loud).
Here comes the elephant Why did he stop? Now I know why Plop! Plop! Plop!
His name is Tiny I know that sounds silly. If you think his trunk’s long Just look at his tusks.
African people Live in huts. Elephants break in To steal their pizzas.
There goes the elephant He’s done a bunk. He’ll be back soon He forgot his ... suitcase.


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Namibia, day 14 ... homeward bound

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Day 14, 24 November – Walvis Bay to Johannesburg and home With our flight at one o’clock there was time for a leisurely breakfast, packing and a final stroll along the strand alongside flamingos and large numbers of chestnut-banded plovers, or to look at common waxbills in local gardens.  Having only one minibus available wasn’t a problem for the group as Walvis Bayairport was such a short distance away. Geoff ferried up those staying at Flamingo Villas first and was soon back at Lagoon Loge for the rest of us. We paused briefly for thousands of lesser flamingos at a former water treatment plant, a dense flock of them in the water behind a single black-necked grebe and many in the air as some people approached.

Walvis BayInternational is very much an airport in the desert. We had an uneventful wait there before walking to the plane for the flight to Johannesburg. In the meantime Geoff and Darrin went back to the garage in Swakopmund: repairs would take time so they returned to Cape Town…
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Namibia, day 13 ... Walvis Bay and Namib Desert

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23 November – Walvis Bay and Namib-NaukluftNational Park
Pre-breakfast birdwatching was along the strand again, alongside early morning keep fit enthusiasts. Chestnut-banded plover was a new bird and there was a Caspian tern that many of us had missed yesterday. In the minibuses we went farther along Walvis Bay after breakfast. The large numbers of lesser flamingos in this area was quite a sight. Waders included thousands of avocets mixed with black-winged stilts, little stints alongside hundreds of curlew sandpipers and many chestnut-banded plovers, as well as those mentioned in yesterday’s account. We then drove into the Namib-NaukluftNational Park: after nearly a fortnight in Namibia, in the Namib desert at last. It was hotter than the relative cool of the coast, but much less so than inland. We stopped to look at a range of flowering plants adapted to the harsh conditions, then tucked into the shade of small copse with a convenient picnic tables for the lunch Geoff had bought firs…
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