Very important thread! 🙏
When Swifts ground, they're in danger. They can't get airborne again without help... please read the quoted thread for advice on what to do if you find a grounded Swift, please retweet it & bookmark it too! 🙏🐦❤️
#ThoughtForTheDay
“Looking into the eyes of an Elephant is to peer into an old soul with feelings of ancient wisdom, with a fellow-creature that understands what life is all about.
Pain, sensitivity, strength, family values, tenacity, hope, and a search for moments of joy all shine out of those deep, clear amber orbs.” ~ Don Winn .
This is a photo of a bee in the US
The pollen on her legs is from dandelions & her tongue is sticking out because she’s been killed due to weed killer on dandelion flowers
Remember this #Spring what many see as weeds, is natures food for #insects
No bees, no insects, no life
#FirstDayOfSpring
Roald Dahl on Measles: Olivia, my eldest daughter, caught measles when she was seven years old. As the illness took its usual course I can remember reading to her often in bed and not feeling particularly alarmed about it. Then one morning, when she was well on the road to recovery, I was sitting on her bed showing her how to fashion little animals out of coloured pipe-cleaners, and when it came to her turn to make one herself, I noticed that her fingers and her mind were not working together and she couldn’t do anything.
'Are you feeling all right?' I asked her.
'I feel all sleepy,' she said.
In an hour, she was unconscious. In twelve hours she was dead.
The measles had turned into a terrible thing called measles encephalitis and there was nothing the doctors could do to save her. That was...in 1962, but even now, if a child with measles happens to develop the same deadly reaction from measles as Olivia did, there would still be nothing the doctors could do to help her. On the other hand, there is today something that parents can do to make sure that this sort of tragedy does not happen to a child of theirs. They can insist that their child is immunised against measles.
...I dedicated two of my books to Olivia, the first was ‘James and the Giant Peach’. That was when she was still alive. The second was ‘The BFG’, dedicated to her memory after she had died from measles. You will see her name at the beginning of each of these books. And I know how happy she would be if only she could know that her death had helped to save a good deal of illness and death among other children.
Roald Dahl, 1986
Boxing Day is the biggest day of the year for fox hunts across the country. So help us ruin their big day.
RT this and drop us a follow if you're against the sick pastime of fox hunting.
Support wildlife this Boxing Day.
How a single tree affects an entire forest
Suzanne Simard has fundamentally reshaped how we understand forests.
Through decades of field research, she demonstrated that trees are linked by vast underground networks of mycorrhizal fungi. These symbiotic partnerships allow trees to exchange carbon, nutrients, water, and chemical signals—sometimes over great distances and across species lines.
Her landmark 1997 paper in Nature provided the first clear evidence that paper birch and Douglas-fir seedlings transfer carbon to one another through fungal connections, with the flow shifting depending on which tree is shaded and needs resources most. This directly challenged the prevailing view of forests as arenas of relentless competition.
Instead, Simard’s work revealed cooperative dynamics: older, hub-like trees—what she calls “Mother Trees”—are the most highly connected nodes in the network. They recognize their genetic kin, allocate more resources to their own seedlings, and even bolster unrelated young trees, enhancing overall forest resilience.
The scientific community now widely refers to these fungal linkages as the “Wood Wide Web.”
Today, her work has inspired everything from Avatar to the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel "The Overstory." Her memoir,
"Finding the Mother Tree," became a global bestseller and is now being adapted into a film starring Amy Adams.
On the ground in British Columbia, Simard partners with Indigenous communities to design logging practices that spare Mother Trees and old-growth networks. Early results show these areas store more carbon, retain more biodiversity, and regenerate decades faster than conventionally clear-cut sites.
Some researchers caution against terms like “mother” or “communication,” preferring strictly neutral language. Simard maintains that the underlying phenomena—resource sharing, kin recognition, and chemical alarm signals—are rigorously documented, and evocative words help people care about forests they might otherwise see only as timber.
In her words: “These forests can recover their complexity and strength, but only if we start managing them as living, connected systems”
Collapsed from exhaustion, its leg in a snare, this Sumatran elephant was helped with an excavator by a conservation group in a final attempt to help it stand.
For several days, the animal had been lying in a forest corridor that linked two oil palm plantations. Shortly after this photograph was taken, the elephant died from blood poisoning.
Sumatra’s Leuser Ecosystem is the only place on Earth where Sumatran elephants, tigers, orangutans and rhinos coexist. All are close to extinction.
Clearance of lowland forests for oil palm plantations has forced elephants closer to human settlements, leading to conflicts. Although illegal, snares are widespread.
📸 ‘Palm Oil Sacrifice’ by Paul Hilton was highly commended in #WPY56’s Wildlife Photojournalism category.
See more powerful images of our natural world in our new exhibition, open now at the Natural History Museum in London.
Book your tickets: https://t.co/1bUEo4iRYM
It doesn’t matter if you’re not Scottish … PLEASE PLEASE email [email protected] who has just said no to mandating swift bricks in Scotland. If EVERYONE asks her to save our swifts then maybe she’ll change her mind. The vote is tomorrow.
🤯3.5 MILLION tonnes of #toxicsludge are being dumped on UK farmland.
This isn’t recycling. It’s pollution, and water companies are cashing in again.
They created this toxic sludge. Now they must pay to clean up their mess.👇
✍️Sign the petition, TODAY: https://t.co/Aus0RcpyAm