There is something of a small, personal and perhaps entirely trivial pleasure in opening up the file of a review one is working on, thinking it needs a lot more work, and looking at it and realising that it's more nearly done than one supposed. Then tapping out a couple more paragraphs and deciding that, no, really, this is probably all that needs ( Read more... )

I am grateful for all of you, who light up my life.

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I am also grateful for The Hedgehog Highway That Knits a Village Together: Hedgehogs need space to create territories, forage and find mates. The compartmentalisation of land into private gardens is one of the causes of their disappearance from our landscape - they have declined by 90% since the ( Read more... )

The story one usually encounters on these shores is that the hedgehog is a threatened and endangered native species: Hedgehogs are one of the nation’s favourite species, yet there’s been a worrying nationwide decline in hedgehog numbers over the last 25 years. The Regent’s Park is now the only central London Royal Park with a breeding population. ( Read more... )

I see that 'feral hogs' are trending on Twitter, wtf, and am moved to link to the very tasty thing I did with wild boar that one time I found it in the local organic butchers.
Also the wild boar in the Forest of Dean - which it's argued are feral, rather than truly wild, being farm escapees.
But the hogs currently causing havoc in Europe are ( Read more... )

Dept of, Has Not Done the Reading: But far from bringing him godlike pleasure, his condition places him at a mournful distance from the rest of humanity, doomed to see everyone he loves age and die. Okay, I daresay the general tone of this is at some remove from Simone de Beauvoir's All Men Are Mortal, which, as I recall, it being some decades ( Read more... )

A little feelgood for the end of this week:
BAAAAAAABY SLOTHS!!!!
Derek the baby wombat
A hedgehog's history of Britain
There are badgers in Kew Gardens!
Ginger says Let Yourself Go

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This entry was originally posted at http://oursin.dreamwidth.org/2460328.html. Please comment there using OpenID. View
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Teenagers and social networking - it might actually be good for them:
New technologies always provoke generational panic, which usually has more to do with adult fears than with the lives of teenagers. In the 1930s, parents fretted that radio was gaining "an invincible hold of their children". In the 80s, the great danger was the Sony Walkman - ( Read more... )

More rus in urbe: the wildlife of London (mammalian).

Okay, you have to trek out to Richmond to see stags at bay (there are deer in other London parks, but those tend to be in enclosures: at Richmond they roam free, which is why every year some nitwit sustains injury through trying to get a close-up of a rutting stag). There have also been ( Read more... )

Rus in urbe (I):

Regent's Park, or, as they apparently prefer to call it, The Regent's Park (hi, Prinny! how's Mrs Fitzherbert?): 'one of the few sites in central London where the Hedgehog is still found'.

(And not just in the London Zoo at the north end.)

It is lovely. I am not surprised a friend of mine who used to work at Bedford College, ( Read more... )

Two things of erinacine cuteness:
Cat mothering hedgehogs, awwwwwww.
Baby hedgehog trapped a crisp packet released after a three-and-a-half hour rescue involving six people. (We hedgehogs are embarrassed by fuss, and I think that is confirmed by wee 'Crispin''s expression.)

Henri, the existentialist cat, contemplates Halloween: None of these ( Read more... )