Excited to share the preprint of our first @cascade-hei.bsky.social paper on “Potential for academic institutions to support international biodiversity commitments” 🌿 🌍.

Red-fronted Tinkerbird perched in the sun. 📍Mbuyuni Farm Retreat, Morogoro, Tanzania. #Birds #NaturePhotography #Tanzania 🪶

I fear this bird visitor has had an unfortunate incident. She was sitting on our trellace looking dazed with a thread on her face & ruffled primaries this morning. Very cute, but wishing her well. Scarce locally, Goldcrests have already been turning up at the coast, so who knows where she's from?

This has been my experience too! With my bionic ears these days I can often hear things before the bright young students I hang out with sometimes!

Some different #birdringing today, as I'm at @spurnbirdobs.bsky.social on the east coast. It's still early autumn here, but a fantastic variety of #birds ringed this morning, with 8 warbler species including a fantastic wood warbler, and fun birds like this Pied Flycatcher and a young Sparrowhawk.

Today marked the end of our @btobirds.bsky.social Constant Effort Site ringing for 2025. We've run a site on campus for 5 years now. I think I might be the first to have a preliminary analysis of the season ready & great news: it has been a cracking breeding season here! #birds #ornithology 1/5

Check out this Senior Research Ecologist- Bioacoustics vacancy @btobirds.bsky.social britishtrustforornithology.postingpanda.uk/job/734089 #ornithology 🪶

🎓🎉Huge congratulations to all our graduates! A fantastic achievement and a lovely day celebrating all your hard work with family and friends.

Great to see @charles-cunningham.bsky.social's paper out on the impacts of woodland connectivity on the presence of woodland species in the UK. onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/... Although ecologists talk about connectivity being important to maintain, the evidence that this is true is weak. 1/

Many congratulations to @helephantmylne.bsky.social on completing a fatastic PhD. It's been a privilidge to have had a part in her work and I know she's going to be continuing on with great things! Looking forward to seeing the papers out soon - standby for all things 🐘 & 🧪!

Did you know about these tiny shiny ants (red arrow) living with wood ants (blue arrow)? They are Shining Guest Ants (Formicoxenus) and we have recently discovered that a wood ant nest can be home to several genetically distinct colonies of these 'guests'! onlinelibrary.wiley.com/share/author... 1/5

Another Cardinal that I hope is high up the Vatican's list today is this fine Cardinal Woodpecker. He would stand up for the underrepresented of African woodlands and promote serious headbanging. Alas, he is also unlikely to become Pope, as he is a #bird. 🌿

With the Vatican's conclave happening imminently, I would like to bring the attention of the world to this beautiful Cardinal Beetle that was working hard on its nomination in Nottingham at the weekend. Sadly, I fear his chances are limited, because he is a beetle. 🌿

Today is #Environment Day & in the UK it is also the start of the "Big Green Give", when UK environmental charities have match funding to double donations. A Rocha UK is raising funds to work with landowners to improve biodiversity. You can support them too donate.biggive.org/campaign/a05...!

It is apparently World Curlew day, so here's a fine individual from our last coastal trip on Lindisfarne. Not quite the longest beak / body ratio of any #bird but not far off!

Looks like African #fire is likely to be on the agenda again. I wrote something a few years ago that explains why this isn't an ecological catastrophe at all - indeed, savannahs need fire: theconversation.com/african-gras...

Are you an African student applying on enrolled on an MSc course in on of the eligible institutes in Africa & wanting to do fieldwork with #birds of prey? This funding could be for you! Apply here: raptorresearchfoundation.org/grants-award... by 30th June

Join us for the second CASCADE webinar on Friday 4th April! We will be joined by @slpbenbow.bsky.social (Fauna & Flora International) and Ifesinachi Okafor-Yarwood (@uniofstandrews.bsky.social) to discuss big questions in ocean governance 🌊 Register here 👉 forms.office.com/e/fxLXph2feK

Are you interested in learning more about this year's #CityNatureChallenge in #York? A meeting will be held on 26th March 🌍👇 docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F... #biodiversity #northyorkshire

Yes, my book pelagicpublishing.com/products/101... and more than 60 of my papers are in here...

I've been trying to get my head around the implications of the new Planning & Infrastructure Bill for #biodiversity. The Times highlights new powers of Compulsory Purchase for Natural England & farmers aren't impressed. Conservationists have worried that is removes EIAs, etc. So what can I see?🌏🧵

This is going to be a fun new series of seminars from @cascade-hei.bsky.social Join us for the first!

A Giant Kingfisher on a Mission… 📍Kigali, Rwanda. #Birds #NaturePhotography 🪶

Today, we have a new page on fertility data on Our World in Data! It has lots of new charts on a wide range of measures such as parental ages at birth, teenage birth rates, twin birth rates, the use of reproductive technologies, and more. Explore it all here: ourworldindata.org/fertility-rate

A really interesting paper on magnetic maps in turtles - some amazing experiments to help pin down mechanisms.

Some good news

Visiting a Bird Observatory? Apply for our Young Bird Observatory Visitors programme! 🐦➡️ www.bto.org/ybov #Ornithology #UKBirding

🆕 The fight for a new nature fund brought #COP16 talks to a halt in Colombia last year. A week before talks resume in Rome, a "reflection note" from Susana Muhamad – whose COP16 presidency has been under a cloud after her resignation – suggests a way out. www.cbd.int/doc/c/b0ca/7...

I looked some more at these biodiversity credits. It seems the best option for a biodiversity project is to mow the vegetation until it is a pefect lawn. With NDVI then homogeneous, the credit you earn tend to infinity. People are buying/selling these credits, right now. 🌿🌏

It’s nearly spring so time to swot up on warbler identification.

The visionary Mossy Earth is providing grants of up to £15k, but usually £2-6k, to enable rigorous testing of conservation actions. (Tips: pick an action not whole programme, have comparison or control, replicate). Exciting! www.mossy.earth/science/inno...

Congratualtions to @helephantmylne.bsky.social on submitting her thesis! She has many tales of elephant relationships &the joys of Bayesian network analysis to tell. We'll be sad to see her go @anthropocenebio.bsky.social but we know she'll be on to more great things and keeping in touch!

A Little Bee-eater on the move… 📍Kigali, Rwanda. #Birds #NaturePhotography 🪶

If you've been following the carbon credit fiasco around the Northern Rangelands of Kenya, the latest legal ruling - that two of the conservancies are unconstitutional, and a permanent injunction prohibiting NRT & partners from conducting conservancy operations is quite the update. Some notes...🌿🌏

Handy summary of UK Government consultation on English Land Use for UK ecology people. 🌿🌏

Last week to apply for this #FundedPhD Opportunity. Inês is brilliant, and working in @anthropocenebio.bsky.social will be great!

Data analysis supports dad-joke punchline #toowettowoo

Our paper on unlocking the value of ranger-based monitoring (RBM), now out in Conservation Letters! Our work is a practical guide on when RBM may be useful for biodiversity conservation and protected area management, with some hard-won lessons for implementing RBM effectively. 🐘🌳🪺🤳🥾🪖

For ecologists wondering if their work ever has an impact on policy this looks like an interesting tool: policyprofiles.sagepub.com From a brief play, some of the policy docs are loosely defined, but it has some handy shortcuts (e.g. giving the pages in monster reports where citations are).🌏🧪

It took me more than 4 years to capture a scene I could only dream of. A magnificent Condor soars above the peaks of Argentina's Mount Fitz Roy, as they are spot lit in beautiful morning light. 🪶 #bluesky #photography #landscape #birds #nature #landscapephotography #naturephotography #travel #scape

The more I look at this, the more I think Plan Vivo's nature credits are bonkers. Consider a project somewhere just 3 species live, 1 distantly related to the other 2. Abundances start at 40, 40 & 40, but after work you reach 80, 50 & 50. Unless the 80 is in the distant relative, this is negative 🌿🌏

#Biodiversity people: While studying biodiversity credits I've been looking in detail at Plan Vivo's metric www.planvivo.org/news/plan-vi.... This includes a relative phylogenetic diversity index based on besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1046/.... I think this is nonsense right? [more]🌿🌏

Great to see this new OA paper out today conbio.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/.... We provide key lessons for those seeking to use rangers to monitor #biodiversity goals in protected areas. Rangers get everywhere & collectively spend more time in PAs than any, so their data should be useful.🧪🧵

Let’s see if the Bluesky mindhive can help track this beauty down… we found a satellite tagged Emperor Penguin today on the fast ice in McMurdo Sound, Ross Sea. Anyone know who might have tagged it? #Seabirds #Penguins @theseabirdgroup.bsky.social @scar-antarctic.bsky.social

Meet my daughters favorite bug — the blushing phantom ❤️. In the cloud forest in Ecuador, her clear wings make a little flutter of pink skip along a few meters in front of us on the hiking trails. They slowly blip along always just out of reach. This is the first I’ve gotten to cooperate for a photo

Lovely to see some good flocks of winter thrushes on the Wolds today, even if they wouldn't pose by the snow! This Fieldfare is particularly fine. #yorkshirebirding

Watercolour studies of Holbeck, Gilling East. Lower- sketchbook study on location. Upper-painted in studio immediately after returning from sketching. jonathanpomroy.wordpress.com

While we failed to find these hawfinches with @jonathanpomroy.bsky.social last week, the reminder that they eat Yew stones set me thinking about that. Eating just 3 stones would be fatal to humans, yet these #birds merrily crunch them. The toxins involved are alkaloids called taxines that ...