#540: A thorny problem

Kenya's Samburu county has marginal land which is prone to desertification. 

To try to keep it in place, they decided to introduce a thorny tree called mathenge (also known as mesquite).

This article looks at what happened next.

Mathenge was planted... and got a little out of control.

#539: Wild London - New Year's Day

Why not welcome 2026 in with the calming tones of Sir David Attenborough.

1st of January, BBC One at 6.30pm - Wild London

Description from the BBC.

After a life spent travelling the globe, the world’s most famous naturalist turns his attention closer to home to explore the wildlife of England’s iconic capital. Having lived in London for 75 years, Sir David has an intimate knowledge of the city’s natural history, and there's no better guide to introduce us to its most spectacular wildlife secrets.

London is considered the greenest major city in the world, with a surprising variety of animal dramas playing out in the most unexpected places. Whether it’s herds of deer invading gardens, pigeons commuting by tube, snakes slithering along Regent's Canal, parakeets raiding green spaces, or seagulls learning new ways to make a killing in the city, Sir David reveals the incredible wild encounters to be experienced across his hometown.

Sir David celebrates the extraordinary ways in which animals are adapting to survive in the urban jungle, whether it be the fortunes of a pair of peregrines nesting on the Houses of Parliament as their chicks attempt their first flight, or a family of foxes living in the heart of Tottenham struggling to get to grips with fierce rivals and dangerous streets. He is inspired as he learns how people across the capital are ensuring some of Britain’s most-loved species can continue to call London home, and he even joins efforts to bring back animals that have disappeared from the city.

Captured over his centennial year, this personal and poignant film is a timely insight into how cities can become homes for wildlife as well as ourselves.

#538: Barry Lopez - external and internal landscapes

From the classic 'Crossing Open Ground'

“I think of two landscapes- one outside the self, the other within. 

The external landscape is the one we see-not only the line and color of the land and its shading at different times of the day, but also its plants and animals in season, its weather, its geology… If you walk up, say, a dry arroyo in the Sonoran Desert you will feel a mounding and rolling of sand and silt beneath your foot that is distinctive. You will anticipate the crumbling of the sedimentary earth in the arroyo bank as your hand reaches out, and in that tangible evidence you will sense the history of water in the region. Perhaps a black-throated sparrow lands in a paloverde bush… the smell of the creosote bush….all elements of the land, and what I mean by “the landscape.”

The second landscape I think of is an interior one, a kind of projection within a person of a part of the exterior landscape. Relationships in the exterior landscape include those that are named and discernible, such as the nitrogen cycle, or a vertical sequence of Ordovician limestone, and others that are uncodified or ineffable, such as winter light falling on a particular kind of granite, or the effect of humidity on the frequency of a blackpoll warbler’s burst of song….the shape and character of these relationships in a person’s thinking, I believe, are deeply influenced by where on this earth one goes, what one touches, the patterns one observes in nature- the intricate history of one’s life in the land, even a life in the city, where wind, the chirp of birds, the line of a falling leaf, are known. These thoughts are arranged, further, according to the thread of one’s moral, intellectual, and spiritual development. The interior landscape responds to the character and subtlety of an exterior landscape; the shape of the individual mind is affected by land as it is by genes."

I have this same edition.

#537: A year of Environmental lunacy

Lovely to see Sharon Witt and Helen Clarke bringing NAEE's Year of Environmental Lunacy blog project to a close with their suggestion of the Murmuring Moon for December.

Some lovely suggestions here for finding out more about this moon, to go with the other contributions through the year.

I was delighted to provide the suggestion for August's Sturgeon Moon to 'replace it' with the Thistledown Moon.

#536: Beach Pebble Guide

Came across a cracking little guide to the pebbles on the beaches of Scotland (in particular) by the Scottish Geology Trust.

It's a free PDF download from this link.

Scottish Geology Trust ©2021 This work is licensed under an Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) licence. 

#535: Mendip National Nature Reserve

Those teaching in or near to Somerset gained another possible option for field visits following the 2023 announcement that Mendip became a National Nature Reserve.

Mendip in #Somerset is our newest ‘super’ #NationalNatureReserve 🎉

Home to a vibrant landscape and nationally endangered species such as horseshoe #bats, this 1,400 hectare #NNR will boost #NatureRecovery whilst connecting people to nature.

Read more: https://t.co/Au8d4RFbgC pic.twitter.com/4dSgNu5eSi

— Natural England (@NaturalEngland) October 19, 2023

 Mendip is a place that I have visited a few times over the years.

#534: Where the streets have... bird's names

A cross posting from my LivingGeography blog.

There is a quote attributed to the American columnist Bill Vaughn, which is that:

"Suburbia is where the developer bulldozes out the trees, then names the streets after them."

This piece in the weekend's Guardian suggests that more streets are now named after birds than before, even while bird species are declining in numbers.

Developers know that such names are popular.

From the article:

The 2023 State of Nature report called the UK “one of the most nature-depleted countries on Earth”, and wild bird numbers have plummeted since the 1970s.

The RSPB study also found that “meadow” in street names had risen by 34%, though wildflower meadows are down 97% since the 1930s.

The RSPB called for the government to do more to support nature, with the planning and infrastructure bill for England entering its final stages. In October it reneged on backing an amendment to the bill calling for swift bricks to be installed in every new home. Swift road names have grown by 58%.

There's a connection here with something I did for Mission:Explore in 2012. I worked to produce a special activity pack to encourage people to ride on the buses in Lowestoft. This picture shows some of the final product, and a bird-watching trip around one of the estates on the edge of town. We were featured in the local paper.

There was also a quote in the piece from the author Michael Warren who wrote the book 'The Cuckoo's Lea' about the presence of bird's names in culture and landscape.

"We love a nature name and developers know it. But the trend for birds in new-build place names masks the severe detachment many of us suffer from nature, while making it seem like everything is OK.”

#533: Nature (dis)connection

Stencil art in an alleway by Norwich market.

Image by Alan Parkinson, shared on Flickr under CC license