Nigel Witham

Designer, Writer, Maker, Nature Warrior, Humanist and one-time BBC TV reporter 🦊 🦔 🐀 🦫 🐁 🦇 🦉

[Nigel Witham @NigelWitham]

Pigeons Post Apocalypse

Feral pigeons nesting beneath the Eastgate Centre, Inverness. I found it sad.

[Nigel Witham @NigelWitham]

@admired_art A Cassowary who let me live to tell

[Protect the Wild @ProtectTheWild_]

This is what we’re fighting for ❤️🦊

[Butterfly Conservation 🦋 @savebutterflies]

BREAKING NEWS - We did it! 📢🦋

The use of neonicotinoid pesticides has been refused for this year. Thank you to the 42,601 supporters of the #ButterflyEmergency who helped make this happen. (1/4)

[Ben Goldsmith @BenGoldsmith]

‘@WildJustice_org challenges Dartmoor Commoners’ Council in High Court to tackle deterioration of wildlife habitats’👏

Our national parks are wrecked by a tiny few whose ‘common’ grazing rights allow them continually to raze whole landscapes with their sheep.

It would be easy for those with grazing rights in our national parks to transition away from highly destructive sheep ranching to a gentler, more traditional way of farming with native cattle, as was the case for centuries until just three or four generations ago.

Being non native, the sheep themselves are miserable, dying in their droves from exposure and disease each year; nobody makes any money from sheep monocultures – it’s a hopeless business model; and the result for the rest of us is that our national parks are not worthy of the label.

A wilder approach to farming in our national parks with native cattle instead of sheep, and an emphasis on nature recovery, is the best and only pathway to economic and social renewal in these remoter landscapes. Society is more than willing generously to support farmers in this transition under the new Environmental Land Management scheme.

Change cannot come soon enough. Nothing ever changed in the past because of an endless flow of taxpayer-funded subsidies for the status quo. And as history shows over and over, an industry which lives for decades on an opioid drip of subsidy grows incapable of innovation.

So we’re now told monocultures of sheep are the last and only ‘culture’ we can have in our national parks, forever, with no change countenanced. Forget the diverse, vibrant past of common land, the cutting of turf, collecting of fuel, honey, fruit and nuts, the domestic ponies, the ‘pannage’ putting out of pigs in the autumn - all gone, never to return. All we can have now is sheep in our national parks, in their tens of millions, forensically munching every last sprig of nature that emerges.

Stuff that. The Commoners’ Councils are taking the rest of us for fools. If it takes a High Court action by one brave little NGO to move things along, so be it.

https://t.co/x1NlFp2Ugc

[Nigel Witham @NigelWitham]

A wild male Cassowary in Far North Queensland

Self evidently he let me go

[Wild Justice @WildJustice_org]

NEWS: Red kites and buzzards are being killed by misuse of rat poisons ☠️

Our new report, Collateral Damage, shows a Government scheme isn't working for wildlife. Today it's reported in @newscientist

Read it here: https://t.co/Sif2vyavYb @ChrisGPackham @RuthTingay @MarkAvery

[Nigel Witham @NigelWitham]

@morrisonMSK @susie_dent Hillaryless :)

[RethinkX @rethink_x]

Goodbye climate change 🌍 Hello superabundance 🚀 Here's how to eliminate 90% of greenhouse gas emissions in 15 years: https://t.co/g6vm5LsKYN

[Nigel Witham @NigelWitham]

@Victorious_1_

[Nigel Witham @NigelWitham]

At the mouth of The River Conon at the end of Cromarty Firth just after sunup.

Scotland is such a delight

[Nigel Witham @NigelWitham]

@georgecmcgavin @DefraGovUK @DefraNature @Keir_Starmer For those with asthma or other breathing difficulties this is tantamount to an assault

[Nigel Witham @NigelWitham]

@admired_art Singular Squirrel

[Nigel Witham @NigelWitham]

@admired_art Fine Balance

[Nigel Witham @NigelWitham]

@junctionbutte @admired_art No

[Nigel Witham @NigelWitham]

@admired_art @BrendleJosie Arrow Slit at Scotland’s End

[Protect the Wild @ProtectTheWild_]

RT if you agree!

[Guy Shrubsole @guyshrubsole]

Ban driven grouse shooting - a Victorian sport that has transformed vast swathes of Britain’s ecosystems for the worse:

[Nigel Witham @NigelWitham]

Anyway, here’s a gratuitous squirrel.