Like to win a brand new hardback copy of Europe’s best field guide (see the review right here)? I thought so. If you’re a member of the 10,000 Birds Conservation Club you’ll have the chance next week. If you’re not, er - you won’t. So join already, or miss out on this and piles of other goodies!

Incredibly a new study based on research by Professor Barbara Block, who tracked more than 150 Great Whites using satellite and acoustic tracking devices, shows that numbers had dropped below the 3,500
tigers that exist in the wild. Numbers have dropped by 90% in 20 years mainly from illegal fishing, but also from being hit by boats and tangled up in fishing nets. Our forests are falling quiet, our farmland has lost most of its wildlife, and our seas are being emptied. I predict that our children will not be thanking us for the mess we’re handing them…

To quote from a report in the Observer newspaper, “More than 35 million animals were legally exported from the region over the past decade…and hundreds of millions more could have been taken illegally. Almost half of those traded were seahorses and more than 17 million were reptiles. About 1 million birds and 400,000 mammals were traded, along with 18 million pieces of coral. The situation is so serious that experts have invented a new term – empty forest syndrome – to describe the gaping holes in biodiversity left behind…”

People are apparently cowering in their homes in a small village in England.  The cause of their fear?  A terrorist pheasant.  No, I am not making this up.  Perhaps we shouldn’t be closing Guantanamo Bay?

The vicious bird has launched several unprovoked attacks on villagers in recent weeks. Men, women, children, prams, bikes, dogs and cars are said to have have fallen foul of the bird in Newsham, near Richmond, North Yorkshire. There are tales of the plucky cock lying in wait for children to get off the school bus, before chasing them screaming to the village green.

In response to the repeated pheasant attacks Gordon Brown, desperate to do anything to improve his poll numbers, stated:

We shall defend our island from the pheasant, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight the pheasant on the beaches, we shall fight the pheasant on the landing grounds, we shall fight the pheasant in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight the pheasant in the hills; we shall never surrender to the pheasant*

Hopefully, the campaign against the pheasant will end soon enough and everything can return to normal.

*There is no evidence whatsoever that Gordon Brown said any such thing.