A program that, to those of us on the other side of the Atlantic, has long been something we've held up as example of what could & should be done to support some of the most important types of field study. Very concerning to see this under threat

Eurasian Curlews have some pretty impressive friends here. 👏👏👏

WILLOW WARBLER is home, on a territory where every year a male sings. Each year in April this is the song that floors me, that takes me back to a wide-eyed child, falling in love for the very first time with the wild.

Crippling defunding of US environmental programmes proposed. “It's an extinction-level event for science.”. www.nature.com/articles/d41...

"The U.S. Forest Service is closing 57 of its 77 research facilities in 31 states under a reorganization plan announced this week, threatening science that looked at how wildfires, drought, pests and global warming are putting pressure on forests." www.nytimes.com/2026/04/03/c...

Given the US regime's cavalier approach to the environment and disregard for endangered conservation, Venezuelan ecologists are right to be concerned about the fate of the country's extraordinary biodiversity as a US protectorate, not least in the wake of Sec Burgum's controversial visit.

In the early 2000s we used to lead bird tours to south Texas, spending days in several of these state and private protected areas. I was asked to take another tour this April and turned it down. Will Texas feel the economic impact of Trump's retrograde policies? www.texasobserver.org/trump-border...

Oh, to be in England now that April's there: the quintessentially English countryside with Medieval cathedral and hundreds of bags of dog faeces.

Fishermen in the Golfete de Coro, NW Venezuela, are documenting a 40 km oil slick from badly maintained pipelines to activated refineries. These images include several candidate Western Hemisphere Shorebird Reserve Network sites. lapatilla.com/2026/03/26/v... lapatilla.com/2026/03/26/v...

Laundering illegally mined gold suits both the US gov and its Venezuelan puppet regime—but especially their cronies who make the lucrative deals. The outlook for the world's largest tropical wilderness and its indigenous people is grave. www.occrp.org/en/feature/b...

A couple of Reform UK Mid-Norfolk candidates came to my door peddling the same nonsense last month, one of the reasons that company directors are at great pains to keep Reform 2025 Ltd cryptofinance secret. youtu.be/qo3MeKz-3b0

A propos yesterday's US general licenses for critical minerals operations: "We're going to be able to control the incredible natural resources of Venezuela... If Americans need high-quality low-cost power we're always going to have access to it." youtu.be/RhtdGCQiXd4?...

The scope for further corruption is obvious—transparency urgently needed: "“At the end of the two days, we were able to bring home $100 million of gold — physically, the gold,” the Interior secretary said." www.cnbc.com/2026/03/25/v...

Alongside the ongoing extrajudicial executions carried out illegally by the US regime, this bombing and brutalisation of innocent campesinos seems almost tame and unremarkable. Bad news for Ecuador though. This is a village in which I stayed on fieldwork years ago. www.nytimes.com/2026/03/24/w...

Last week Wader Study published the results of ongoing shorebird research, led by Sandra Giner, that I became involved in from 2016. We identify 27 priority sites of which 17 potentially fulfil Western Hemisphere Shorebird Reserve Network criteria. #ornithology www.waderstudygroup.org/article/20079/

Human rights and environmental NGOs reject the proposed new Mining Law in Venezuela. The concept of 'ecomining', championed for years by Venezuela's de facto regime and legitimised here, has caused irreparable environmental damage in S Venezuela. ecopoliticavenezuela.org/el-proyecto-...

Shorebird conservation in Venezuela: status, threats and priorities NEW SYNTHESIS/REVIEW by Giner and Sharpe www.waderstudygroup.org/article/20079/ #waders #shorebirds #ornithology #research #conservation

I am a human non-passive acoustic monitor for biodiversity research and I approve this message! 😉 doi.org/10.1111/2041... #ornithology

Disgraced ex-PM Johnson was paid $325,000 to meet with Maduro in 2024 under circumstances he tried to cover up. Johnson-Maduro negotiations were financed by Merlyn Advisors whose CEO Maarten Petermann is a trustee of the Aspinall Foundation found guilty of financial irregularities.

I've been thinking about this horror done to Smokey for 24 hours now and I am even more irate. These guys do nothing but shit on the wildland fire culture that took decades to build, and Smokey is part of that. GTFO with the tats and the 47 hat. 1/

A great new Neotropical Birding (#38) has just arrived, a combination of dependably high quality staples with wonderful feature articles that really push the frontiers. Please read and support or join! Well done again @jameslowenwild.bsky.social @neobirdconserve.bsky.social! #ornithology

People seem shocked that torture, repression and human rights violations continue in Venezuela as a US protectorate under puppet government 🤔. The main change since 3 Jan is simply that the authoritarian regimes of Washington and Caracas are now closely aligned with common goals.

Three major new studies on democracy and freedom all find the U.S. is slipping further away from democracy. Leaders of two of those studies say President Trump's goal is to rule as an autocrat. n.pr/4uG99Am

Fieldwork beginning, but my 'Shorebird Conservation in Venezuela' T-shirts—a gift from Sandra Giner years ago—are full of holes. If we want shorebirds, conservation funders should be dramatically increasing finance for Venezuela, not cutting it. Don't punish researchers! #ornithology

The US President and 'Acting President' of Venezuela proposing full annexation of the recently subjugated protectorate...

Because of the ongoing rapid decline & persistent reports of disturbance we have taken the difficult decision this week to add Lesser Spotted Woodpeckers in the UK to the long list of eBird sensitive species support.ebird.org/en/support/s... despite the cost to the science of #Ornithology #UKBirding

🦜🏔️ How did vibrant Amazonian parrot feathers end up in a desert tomb on the Pacific coast of Peru 1,000 years ago? Our new paper on @natcomms.nature.com reveals they didn't just trade feathers, pre-Inca societies transported live macaws and parrots across the Andes!👇 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

The UK is to issue banknotes depicting wildlife rather than historical figures. In 2008 the Central Bank of Venezuela used images of threatened animals from our national IUCN Red Data Book, produced and published by Provita. This proved enormously popular. PDF: www.provita.org.ve/wp-content/u...

Fox's White House Correspondent is—characteristically—woefully misinformed, but US efforts to appropriate Venezuela's minerals are certainly moving swiftly. This will become one of the most pressing environmental issues facing Venezuela as a US protectorate.

DUTCH ENGINEERING & BIODIVERSITY LOSS Great new post in WaderTales on how the closure of Zuiderzee by the 'Afsluitdijk' may well have hastened the extinction of the Slender-billed Curlew & caused the disappearance of a unique form of Pacific Golden Plovers. wadertales.wordpress.com/2026/03/09/s...

A reminder that humans in cars - notably omitted from this thanks to motonormativity - kill 1.2m people every year

New paper out in ecology letters! with @andylee.bsky.social @allydefduf.bsky.social We synthesized the active debate on how scientists define sex, including limitations and assumptions. We believe this discussion will lead to more accurate science. onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Imagine this level of funding being used for conservation: "Colossal is privately held, but says it has already raised more than $600 million and was valued at $10 billion during a financing round in early 2025."

Excellent! Adel Dam was my home patch for years and I did a lot of territory mapping there in the early 1980s, when it held Willow Tits. I've been asking YWT if they will remove feeders, which were still there on my last visit in January.

US Embassy in Venezuela welcomes Sec of the Interior & Chairman of the National Energy Dominance Council Burgum to promote mining and secure supply chains of critical minerals. Most known reserves are in fragile areas of exceptional endemism and biodiversity. x.com/usembassyve/...

Umbral: an Open-Source Platform to Measure Venezuela’s Transition: https://www.caracaschronicles.com/2026/03/02/umbral-an-open-source-platform-to-measure-venezuelas-transition/

Although we have known this for many years—e.g. @neobirdconserve financed early work by Vitek Jirinek—this should have been the top news headline last week. These declines in 'pristine' tropical forests are well-documented, poorly understood and continue apace. www.science.org/content/arti...

"10 years ago the launch of the Orinoco Mining Arc extinguished environmental institutionality in Venezuela". Difficult to argue with that. The USA should urge its new protectorate to abolish the AMO rather than promoting further US extractivism and corruption. provea.org/actualidad/a...

US companies lobbying Trump for access to Venezuela's 'Orinoco Mining Arc'. The author is wrong to claim that "government has no control". Will crony foreign corporations be better for the environment and indigenous communities than current regime mafias? www.wsj.com/world/americ...

"E=mc² is liberal claptrap" (yes, it's real).

We used to spend hours fishing for Bullheads, Stone Loach, Brown Trout and crayfish in Adel Beck in the 1970s. Invertebrates were plentiful and there were sometimes Dippers. Last year we found nothing, and the beck reeked of sewage. Small sample size, but I doubt continual sewage dumping helps.

In 2012–2018 alone, 90 tonnes of gold mined illegally in the Venezuelan Guayana, with a then value of $ 3 billion, was smuggled via Cuaraçao (often on KLM flights) to be laundered in Italy, Turkey and, above all, Switzerland. storage.googleapis.com/qurium/arman...

'There's no common land left in England', someone told me once - there is and it is still being fought over. @patrickbarkham.bsky.social shows how vulnerable commons can still be. Enclosure for development this time - always about profits from land. www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2026...

If you find a dead bird, please report to Defra/Deara for possible collection and testing, and also to @birdtrack.bsky.social for monitoring purposes (really easy one the phone app). Note that records to BirdTrack don't feed through to Defra/Deara but really important to collect info for monitoring.

I've spent the last couple of weeks putting old bird records of conservation importance online. Here's (most of) our 1988 Cerro El Olvido, Paria Peninsula surveys, NE Venezuela. Great baseline data! Much more to come! ebird.org/tripreport/4... #ornithology

(1/) Grey Partridge can be a difficult species to find in many parts of the UK nowadays. This species is closely associated with arable farmland and hay meadows. It declined by 92% across the UK between 1967 and 2023. @btobirds.bsky.social JNCC RSPB Science #Ornithology

Yeah, Hugo Chávez did that too...

A couple of spivs from one of England’s authoritarian nationalist populist outfits, Reform UK Ltd, knocked on our door at the weekend. Unsurprisingly they beat a hasty retreat when confronted on actual policies. Greenwashing will not help the environment. www.theguardian.com/politics/202...

¡Atención, comunidad latinoamericana! El Consejo Norteamericano de Anillamiento (NABC) abre la convocatoria a aplicar a pequeñas becas para apoyar el desarrollo y certificación de anilladores de aves de América Latina y el Caribe. Aplica aqui: www.animalecology.org/grants

🚨Paper alert🚨 Very happy to see our paper published in @science.org #ScienceAdv. Very greatful to have worked with such a great team @duncanobrien.bsky.social #tomJohnson @robinfreeman.bsky.social #ValentinaMarconi #LouiseMcRae @expecocons.bsky.social 👇Check the main findings below!