mark tutton 💙

#sophiefromromania is up early this morning and wants to say thank you to all her Twitter followers but please now join her on Instagram (rorycellan) and BlueSky (@rorycj.bsky.social) - the prof can also be found at diane1859 ( instagram) and dianecoyle1859.bsky.social (BlueSky)

Time to leave, but I’ll miss the constructive discussions across divides that were once possible here. Hoping the new place can avoid becoming an echo chamber - but still lacking the hunters farmers gamekeepers and countryside folk needed to challenge & engage the ecology folks!

The main challenge with Butterfly of the Year 2024 was the battle for Bottom Place: High Brown Frit, Small Tort, 'Common', Adonis, Chalkhill & Holly blues (esp 2nd brood), Small Copper, Small Heath & Clouded Yellow were all dire! I saw 8 Small Copps, only...

Butterfly of the Year 2024: Bottom Place, and relegated... Small Tortoiseshell - I saw 8 all year, only. Really worried about them... Going... and we don't really know why...

Butterfly of the Year 2024: Winner - NOT AWARDED, no outstanding candidate. First time it's not been awarded - this was the worst butterfly season of my 61 years... Instead, we have a But-a-Fly of the Year, the Downland Beefly Villa cingulata! @flygirlNHM

You have allowed our rivers & lakes to be abused for so long and to such an extent that major keystone species are now under existential threat. Stop politicising nature with more empty rhetoric, and allocate some of our tax £ to getting your own failing house in order first.

What can you give to a river that needs everything? This Christmas I decided to give my river the gift of life, in the form of willows trees. I headed out on the River Roding in my canoe, from sunrise to sunset on the shortest day of the year, to see if I could hand harvest & plant 100 willows in a day. Here’s how I got on… 🧵

🌍 This is a long story about my long Journey: Fighting for Donderberg, @Donderberg2, a Vital Green Space in #Brussels! Below is my first post on @X about Donderberg, but the real journey began in 2011. I vividly remember standing alongside my neighbors while pregnant, organizing conferences and passionately advocating for our cause. Today, my daughter is 11 years old 👩‍👧, and I still vividly remember the powerful moment when I delivered both offline and online petitions to the Royal Palace at @MonarchieBe, all while she was just 3. By the time she was 6, she was by my side as I toured the Region of Brussels, raising awareness - efforts that led to an article being published about our fight. I spent countless summer holidays speaking with people and organizations, dedicating all my time to this cause. This journey has become much more than a fight for a green space; it’s a fight for the kind of future we want to build for the generations to come. After a few years of hard work, a dedicated local Committee was formed to safeguard Donderberg! @Donderberg2 Soon, people, organizations, and major environmental associations in Brussels and Europe joined our movement. 🌱🌍 Just a few days ago, we received incredible news: thanks to the tireless intervention of politician @DavidWeytsman @MR_officiel, the project threatening Donderberg was officially halted. 🚫 This is not just a win for us - it’s a monumental victory for environmental protection and justice! This breakthrough gave me a powerful opportunity to share a message in #Istanbul just two days ago at the human rights organization @SivilDusun. There, I had the chance to explain the concept of #ecocide within the context of the #EU and the good news about Donderberg. 🌱💧 The destruction of these vital areas harms not only the biodiversity of the region but also the people who depend on them. If I hadn’t been connected to a platform like this, I would not have been able to reach these communities and share our message. 📱🌎 But my battle isn’t over yet. Madam Secretary of State @AnsPersoons I urge you to reimburse the legal fees I’ve paid for justice before the State Council. ⚖️ It’s time to honor the decision that was made. Still waiting! I kindly ask that the transfer be made as per the judicial ruling. 🏦The fight for Donderberg is over, and its victory is a testament to what we can achieve when we stand together for justice, the environment, and the recognition of ecocide as a crime. ✊🌿 #HumanRights #EnvironmentalJustice #Ecocide #Donderbergh #Victory #Justice #FightForTheFuture #GlobalMovement 🌍💚 #Belgium #Brussels

The 'farmers' protest is a good time to remind people of the Just Stop Oil protestors who got 21 years, just for planning a protest. Two tier justice indeed.

Sadly yet another deadly myth is doing the rounds and now I've actually seen a so-called rescue, AND one of these toxic self-professed 'hedgehog experts' repeat it, I must address it. FACT: Only full sized healthy hedgehogs can hibernate. Until they have reached that happy state they will be forced to stay up. MYTH: Feeding them stops them hibernating. No, feeding them stops them starving. There is no natural food around now (which is the reason why hedgehogs hibernate) so those who were born too late to be big enough to safely hibernate, or are a little sickly, will die of starvation if you stop providing food. You are not 'encouraging them to stay up', and they aren't still up 'because of the mild winter'. They are still up because they are sick or underweight so need you to provide safe food (cat or dog food only). So please don't pay attention to these myths. Always ask an established, trusted, frontline worker at a rescue for advice, if unsure.

Butterflies extinct in NL: Camberwell Beauty (rouwmantel, N antiopa). Last Dutch population until 1964, after that only a few migrants every year, in some summers (1995, 2006, 2021) invasions from NE, E or SE. Some manage to hibernate, but so far no reproduction anymore.

Possibly Norfolk’s River Lugg moment🤔 over half a mile of WaterVole habitat destroyed + a gravel bed used by spawning Brown Trout now turned into a porridge of Clay silt

It is no coincidence that bats & newts are receiving flack for supposedly stopping infrastructure, house building & other development. These are some of the only wildlife which has substantive protections, both on the creatures themselves & their habitat. Most other parts of Nature have often worthless procedural protections that can be overridden with the stroke of a bureaucrat’s pen, so that we don’t even usually register their loss. It is usually felt as a mere absence of the vitality, diversity & amount of Nature that people would once have taken for granted, if it is registered at all. It is more than possible to build the housing & infrastructure that Britain needs whilst also protecting & restoring the Nature which also calls these islands home. However, to do so will take thoughtfulness, imagination & effort, qualities which seem in short supply from a government seemingly determined to whack up buildings & lay down concrete without considering the effect on the already damaged & denuded natural world in Britain.

As Starmer has now singled out the HS2 bat tunnel as an example of absurd environmental protections, its time to make the argument that it shows why we need *more* protections for Nature, rather than less. At the moment we have a system where there are insufficient generalised protections for Nature. The practical effect of this is that for the majority of the country Nature can be destroyed & degraded with impunity & we see this happening all around the country, with biodiversity & the richness of Nature almost universally crashing. The further that biodiversity crashes generally, the more pressure is placed on the ‘honeypot’ sites for particular species or ecosystems, because they are the amongst the last repositories of such richness. They are protected with ever more detailed regulations & inspections & are the subject of increasingly expensive mitigation schemes if human development impinges upon them. If our society had a better relationship to Nature, we would have prime bat habitat & innumerable colonies of different species of bat across the length & breadth of the country. This would mean that any bat colonies near to big infrastructure projects like HS2 could be moved or (if they remain in place), an occasional bat strike by a high speed train would be irrelevant in the context of a healthy nationwide population. Therefore, if politicians think that mitigation measures like the bat tunnel are too complicated & expensive, the response should not be to abolish them & leave the last outposts of particular species & ecosystems to be destroyed, but change the system so that Nature across the UK is in a sufficiently rich & healthy state that such protections for small pockets of Nature are simply unnecessary.

Unlikely as it seems this is the site where Hampshire’s first Lizard Orchid for 90yrs was found in 2022. Sadly no more courtesy of the local highways authority - it’s just about under the digger - fortunately there were a few more discovered at another site shortly after. 😢

Butterflies extinct in NL: Red-underwing Skipper (kalkgraslanddikkopje, S sertorius). Disappeared a few years before I started butterflying mid-1980s, but was then still present at this Belgian site 2km across the border. A typical species of steep calcareous grasslands.

📣 Join us on Dec 11 @ 8PM (Bishkek), when @tshiring2014, founder of Snow Leopard Journey & Sisters will share her trailblazing efforts in the Dolpo #Himalayas to empower local youth and foster #coexistence between herders & #snowleopards 🐾 #Conservation snowleopardnetwork.org/2024/11/30/sln…

Update on Dr Sarah Benn’s case ⬇️

Butterflies extinct in NL: Pearl-bordered Fritillary (zilvervlek, Boloria euphrosyne). Always rare, only 219 records. Would pop up at a site (from D or B?), could be abundant for a few years, and disappeared again. Last collected specimen from 1959, after that only a few claims.

well done Enviromental board for rejecting the proposal to allow Lynx hunting this winter. No Lynx hunting in Estonia since 2014. I´m very proud of this.