Category Archives: Birds

Want to conserve birds and mammals? Then conserve their insects – our new paper in Nature Reviews Biodiversity sets out the details

It’s sometimes easy to forget quite how much of the living world depends upon insects.

That might seem an odd thing for someone who has spent much of his career studying insects and their relationships with plants to say. But conservation, ecological research, and public interest are still disproportionately focused on vertebrates: the birds, mammals, reptiles, amphibians and fishes that most people think of when they hear the word “wildlife”.

Yet those animals exist within ecological networks in which insects are frequently central players, not walk-on extras. A new review that I’ve co-authored with Rob Cooke, Eliza Grames, Chris Elphick and 18 other colleagues, published in Nature Reviews Biodiversity, tries to bring together what we know about those relationships – if you follow this link it’s free to read:

Cooke, R., Grames, E.M., Ollerton, J. et al. (2026) The importance of insect biodiversity for vertebrates. Nature Reviews Biodiversity DOI: 10.1038/s44358-026-00201-w.

The starting point is food, and the numbers are striking. We assembled diet information for 19,750 species of terrestrial and freshwater vertebrates. Of those for which data are available, 73% eat invertebrates and 44% eat them exclusively. That alone ought to give us pause when thinking about the consequences of insect declines.

But one of the things that I particularly enjoyed about writing this review is exploring with colleagues how food is only the beginning of the story. All of us involved in it, I think, learned just as much as we contributed.

Much more than something to eat

The relationships between insects and vertebrates are extraordinarily varied, and some are wonderfully unexpected. Termite mounds and ant nests provide nesting sites, refuges and places to lay eggs for mammals, birds, reptiles and amphibians. Some bats use cavities created by beetle larvae. Birds incorporate insect and spider silk into their nests. Other birds deliberately nest close to wasps or ants, apparently gaining protection from predators.

Then there are the chemical relationships. Poison frogs obtain many of their defensive alkaloids from the insects and other arthropods that they eat. Some snakes acquire defensive toxins from fireflies. Birds, mammals, reptiles and amphibians engage in various forms of “anting” or anointing, applying ants and other invertebrates to their bodies, probably for a variety of functions including parasite control.

Insects can even provide sanitation services. Beetles remove vertebrate dung and can thereby reduce the survival of parasites, while moths living in the nests of some birds consume faeces and other organic debris. There is fossil evidence that similar relationships involving feather-feeding beetles occurred in dinosaur nests during the Cretaceous.

One of the figures in the paper brings together examples from around the world, and is worth spending some time exploring. There are chimpanzees applying insects to wounds, parrots nesting in termite mounds, geckos “milking” honeydew from planthoppers, frogs sheltering in ant nests, herons using insects as fishing bait, and much more. Ecological interactions are rarely dull!

Insects connect ecosystems

There is also a much bigger ecological story within this review, because insect relationships with vertebrates move enormous quantities of energy and nutrients through ecosystems. Aquatic insects emerge from streams and lakes and become food for terrestrial animals; terrestrial insects fall into rivers and feed fishes. In some forest birds, aquatic insects can provide more than a quarter of their energy budget, rising seasonally to 50–90%. Conversely, terrestrial invertebrates can provide approximately half of the annual energy budget of freshwater fishes.

And then there are the indirect effects. As readers of this blog will know, a lot of my research and writing is related to plant pollination, but insect pollination doesn’t just matter to plants. When an insect pollinates a plant whose fruits or seeds are subsequently eaten by a bird or mammal, the insect is indirectly supporting that vertebrate too.

One striking example concerns figs. Fig trees depend upon their tiny agaonid wasp pollinators, while figs themselves are eaten by at least 1,274 species of birds and mammals. Remove the wasps and the consequences potentially propagate far beyond the insects and plants themselves.

This is something I’ve discussed from a different direction in my book Birds & Flowers, where the focus is largely on birds as pollinators rather than insects supporting birds, though all nectar-feeding birds also consume insects. But the broader lesson is the same: species do not exist independently of the ecological relationships that sustain them. I’ve written previously about some of the extraordinary diversity of these pollination relationships on this blog, including in my post on the limits to pollinator diversity.

What happens if the insects disappear?

This brings us to the more difficult question addressed by the review. There is now substantial evidence that insect abundance, biomass and diversity are changing, although, as I’ve argued on this blog before, the magnitude, geography and taxonomic extent of those changes need to be discussed carefully rather than reduced to simplistic claims of an impending “insect apocalypse”.

Nevertheless, widespread changes in insect populations inevitably raise the question of what happens to the vertebrates that depend upon them. Here the evidence becomes surprisingly patchy.

There are good reasons to expect effects: a meta-analysis of 125 studies, for example, found strong positive relationships between insect prey availability and bird reproductive success and chick condition. European insectivorous birds declined by 13% between 1990 and 2015 while omnivorous bird populations remained stable. There are also examples involving bats, small mammals and other groups.

But demonstrating that declining insects actually caused a particular vertebrate population to decline is much harder. Insects and vertebrates can respond simultaneously to habitat destruction, pesticides, climate change and other pressures, making cause and effect difficult to disentangle.

That’s an important distinction. Ecology is full of plausible stories; demonstrating the causal links is another matter. There are nevertheless cases where dependence on particular insects is difficult to ignore. The Critically Endangered Mountain Pygmy Possum in Australia depends heavily on Bogong Moths, whose numbers have crashed. The probable extinction of the Eskimo Curlew has likewise been linked partly to the disappearance of the Rocky Mountain Locust, formerly an important component of its diet.

A surprisingly large gap in our knowledge

Perhaps the thing that surprised me most while working on this review was how poorly documented many insect–vertebrate interactions remain. Even something as apparently straightforward as “what insects does this bird eat?” often turns out not to have a satisfactory answer. Studies may report prey simply as “invertebrates”, “arthropods”, or “insects”, with little or no taxonomic resolution. Birds are much better studied than most other vertebrates, yet detailed quantitative diet information is still available for only a small fraction of species.

Non-feeding relationships are even more scattered through the literature. This is part of what ecologists call the “Eltonian Shortfall“: our incomplete knowledge of who interacts with whom in nature.

One conclusion of the review is therefore that we need much better ways of recording these interactions: common data standards, better taxonomic resolution, long-term monitoring, experiments, larger databases, and greater collaboration between entomologists and vertebrate ecologists. Citizen science, computer vision, metabarcoding and environmental DNA all have potentially important roles to play.

There is also a plea here for something rather unfashionable: natural history. Observations of animals eating, nesting, sheltering, grooming and otherwise interacting with insects are not trivial anecdotes. Properly documented and brought together, they are the raw material from which larger ecological patterns emerge.

Conserving relationships, not just species

For me, one of the broader messages from this review is that conservation needs to pay much more attention to what I’ve referred to in the past as the “biodiversity of species interactions“.

We naturally talk about conserving species and habitats. But an ecosystem is not merely a list of species occupying the same place. It is also the vast network of feeding, pollination, seed dispersal, decomposition, competition, parasitism, facilitation and other interactions connecting those species.

Lose enough of those connections and an ecosystem can change profoundly even before many species have disappeared. That has a very practical implication: insect conservation is also vertebrate conservation. If we want landscapes that support healthy populations of birds, bats, amphibians, fishes and other vertebrates, maintaining abundant and diverse insect communities is not an optional extra. It is part of the ecological infrastructure upon which those animals depend. And, as our review makes abundantly clear, we have probably only begun to understand the full extent of that dependence. That’s why nature conservation policies and regulations, such as Biodiversity Net Gain (BNG) in England for instance, need to look carefully at their implications for insects and other invertebrates.

Finally, I’d like to thank all of the contributors to this paper for working so diligently on the review. It’s an output from the Vertebrates and Insects Working Group, which was formed by the Status of Insects Research Coordination Network – check out the website and get involved!

Bird pollination finally confirmed in Britain!

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In my book Birds & Flowers, I included a chapter called “The curious case of Europe”. The point of that chapter was simple enough: compared with much of the rest of the world, Europe appears to be oddly deficient in bird pollination. There are no hummingbirds, no sunbirds, no honeyeaters, and very few native plants that obviously look as though they have evolved with birds as their main pollinators. And it Britain, it appears that bird pollination is totally absent.

But “appears” is doing a lot of work there.

For decades, European bird–flower interactions have tended to be treated as marginal curiosities: Blue Tits taking nectar from willow catkins, warblers dusted with pollen, finches messing about in blossom. Interesting natural history, certainly, but not necessarily pollination. The assumption has usually been that insects do the serious work, and birds are at best incidental visitors.

A new paper in Journal of Ecology called “Generalist passerine birds perform a functional role as pollinators in temperate Europe“, by Sandra Anderson, George Perry and Rose Thorogood challenges that assumption in a very useful way. Working at Wicken Fen in Cambridgeshire, they found that pollen transport by passerine birds was widespread. Most of the birds they sampled carried pollen, and several species — including Blue Tit, Blackcap, Chiffchaff, Wren, Redpoll and Bullfinch — regularly carried meaningful loads.

More importantly, they tested whether this mattered to the plants. By excluding birds from flowers while allowing insects access, they showed that fruit-set was reduced in several early-flowering woody plants, including Blackthorn (Prunus spinosa), Hawthorn (Crataegus monogyna) and Buckthorn (Rhamnus cathartica). In other words, the birds were not just getting dusty faces. They were contributing to plant reproduction.

I should say that I was one of the reviewers of this paper, so I have followed its development with particular interest. What I like about it is that it does not try to claim that Europe secretly has a hidden flora of classic “bird flowers”. These are not red tubular blossoms adapted to hummingbirds or sunbirds. They are familiar, open, pale, spring-flowering shrubs and trees. Nor are the birds specialised nectar-feeders. They are generalist passerines making use of seasonal resources.

That is precisely why the paper is interesting. It shifts the question from “does this look like bird pollination?” to “does bird visitation actually function as pollination?” That distinction matters. Pollination syndromes can be useful, but they can also blind us to interactions that do not fit the textbook categories.

The seasonal context is also important. These interactions peak early in spring, when willows, blackthorn and other woody plants are flowering, temperatures are still cool, insects may be unreliable, and birds are preparing to breed or arriving from migration. Under those conditions, even occasional bird visits could be valuable to plants needing pollen moved between individuals.

For me, this paper strengthens the argument I made in “The curious case of Europe”: Europe is not devoid of bird–flower interactions; rather, we have been looking for the wrong kind of bird pollination. Instead of obvious “ornithophilous” specialisation, we may have overlooked a more diffuse, opportunistic, generalist system involving common birds and common spring-flowering woody plants.

That may not be as spectacular as a hummingbird hovering at a tropical flower, but ecologically it is just as revealing.

The photo above is from Birds & Flowers and shows pollen on the face of a Eurasian Blue Tit in the early spring. Bird mist-netted under licence in Northamptonshire, UK. (© Lynne Barnett)

Do birds pollinate the iconic Golden Lotus? A new study suggests that they do!

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The Golden Lotus (Musella lasiocarpa) is one of China’s most iconic plants — a striking member of the banana family (Musaceae) that seems to bloom forever. Its brilliant yellow, lotus-like bracts have long made it a favourite of subtropical gardeners, though it also has utility as a food and fibre crop, and is associated with Chinese Buddhism. As you can see above it often features stylistically in Chinese temples, and in my visits to Yunnan we frequently encounter it during fieldwork on farms, planted to support terraced fields:

But despite its fame, one mystery has lingered for decades: what actually pollinates it?

Until now, Musella was thought to rely mainly on insects, particularly bees, for pollination. That assumption made it something of an outlier within the banana family, where most species are pollinated by birds or bats. But a new study, in which I was involved as part of an international team of predominantly Chinese and Brazilian researchers, has turned that view on its head.

By combining careful field observations with citizen science records, our team found that the Golden Lotus is regularly visited by an impressive diversity of birds — twelve species from five different families. As I documented in my recent book Birds & Flowers: An Intimate 50 Million Year Relationships, many of these visitors, such as bulbuls and sunbirds, are known nectar-feeders, and their behaviour at the flowers suggests that they are acting as effective pollinators. This discovery significantly expands what we know about the pollination ecology of the Golden Lotus, and places it firmly within the broader pattern of bird pollination that characterises much of the banana family.

Interestingly, the plant’s features — large, robust, vividly coloured bracts, abundant accessible nectar, and long-lived blooms — make perfect sense in this new light. These are traits that favour bird pollination rather than the short, concentrated visits typical of bees.

But the significance goes beyond one species. Bird pollination plays a vital, and often overlooked, role in China’s native flora, linking ecosystems from tropical rainforests to mountain valleys. Understanding these relationships is important not only for biodiversity conservation but also for horticulture — helping gardeners and landscape designers to create spaces that attract and sustain pollinators of all kinds.

The Golden Lotus has always been celebrated for its beauty and longevity. Now, we can add another layer to its story: a reminder that even the most familiar plants can still surprise us, and that nature’s partnerships are often more complex — and more colourful — than we imagine.

Here’s the reference with a link to the paper, which is open access:

Albuquerque-Lima, S., Ferreira, B. H. d. S., Rech, A. R., Ollerton, J., Lunau, K., Smagghe, G., Li, K.-Q., Oliveira, P. E., & Ren, Z.-X. (2025). Beyond Bees: Evidence of Bird Visitation and Putative Pollination in the Golden Lotus (Musella lasiocarpa)—One of the Six Buddhist Flowers—Through Field Surveys and Citizen Science. Plants, 14(20), 3157. https://doi.org/10.3390/plants14203157

A new review gives us a deeper understanding of the evolution of plant-pollinator interactions

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If you’ve read my book Birds & Flowers: An Intimate 50 Million Year Relationship, you’ll know that I spend a few pages discussing the long-standing paradigm of how interactions between plants and their pollinators evolve and result in the formation of new plant species. This is referred to as the Stebbins (or Grant-Stebbins) Most Effective Pollinator Principle (MEPP). The MEPP is fairly straightforward and intuitive: flowers evolve their colour, shape, scent, rewards, and so forth as adaptations to the type of flower visitor that successfully moves the most pollen between flowers.

However, the MEPP is not the only Principle in town – there’s also Aigner’s Least Effective Pollinator Principle (LEPP) which is not so intuitive. In the LEPP, flowers can adapt to pollinators that are less successful at pollination, as long as those adaptations do no interfere with the pollination services provided by other flower visitors.

As I note in Birds & Flowers, we don’t know which of these Principles is more frequent in nature, because the LEPP has been much less intensively studied than the MEPP. That’s in part because it’s less well known, but also because the field work and experimental procedures required to test the LEPP are much more challenging.

Hopefully this is about to change with the publication of a brilliant critical review of the MEPP by pollination ecologists Kathleen Kay and Bruce Anderson published in the journal Annals of Botany, entitled: Beyond the Grant–Stebbins model: floral adaptive landscapes and plant speciation. The paper is open access – follow that link and you can download a copy.

Kathleen and Bruce discuss not just the MEPP v the LEPP, but also other ways in which flowers can evolve, framed around the idea of floral evolution as movement across an “adaptive landscape,” where plants are not shaped only by one pollinator but by the need to maximise overall reproductive success. This perspective allows us to explore how flowers evolve when influenced by multiple pollinators, how transitions between floral forms take place, and how speciation occurs through a combination of factors beyond pollination alone. It emphasises that pollinators are important drivers of floral change, but speciation is more likely when divergence happens across several aspects of a plant’s ecology, not just through its flowers.

It’s a great review and well worth your time reading in detail. Perhaps my favourite line in the paper comes from the abstract: “The Grant–Stebbins model, while inspiring decades of empirical studies, is a caricature of pollinator-driven speciation and explains only a limited range of adaptive outcomes.” This is something that many of us have been arguing for years: the natural world is extremely complex, so we should not expect these ecologically critical interactions between flowers and their pollinators to have simple origins or ecologies.

Join me for a “Birds & Flowers” talk in Cambridge on the 12th September!

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If you are in or around Cambridge next week, I’m giving a talk on Friday 12th September at the Cambridgeshire Bird Club about my recent book Birds & Flowers: An Intimate 50 Million Year Relationship.

The event takes place in the Wilkinson Room, St. John’s Church, Hills Road. Doors open at 7pm and the talk begins at 7.30pm. There’s a £2.00 charge for non-members – more details can be found by following this link.

I’ll bring copies of both Birds & Flowers and Pollinators & Pollination: Nature and Society, if anyone wants to buy a signed book.

I hope to see you there!

Why are there large gaps in the British distribution of Common Elder?

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Back in mid-April, Karin and I spent a long weekend in the New Forest, exploring the walking trails around the village of Brockenhurst and watching the bird life of the coastal wetlands near Lymington. After a few days something odd struck me: the hedgerows and woodland edges in the area contained almost no Common Elder (Sambucus nigra). Why is that odd? Well, in the article I wrote about Common Elder in 2022 for British Wildlife, I described the plant as ‘so commonplace that we hardly give it a second glance’. Common Elder is such a ubiquitous species that, as Sherlock Holmes observed in The Adventure of Silver Blaze, its absence in a landscape struck me as a ‘curious incident’.

At first I thought that I was so preoccupied with the New Forest’s birds and other wildlife and just not spotting elder, which early in the season, before it flowers, tends to merge into the general greenery of the countryside. Because elder is everywhere, right? In fact this map from the Biological Flora of the British Isles account of the species showing the occurrence of the species in 10km squares suggests just that:

Similarly, if you look at the distribution map of Sambucus nigra from the NBN Atlas, it also appears that it’s everywhere, a big blob of elderlyness across the whole country:

That’s not surprising, I can imagine you’re thinking, after all its berries are eaten by a range of birds and mammals, that disperse its seeds far and wide. It’s just the kind of species that you would expect to be widespread across the country. Which of course it is – it’s a very common species. But once you focus more closely on specific parts of Britain you see that there are some striking gaps in where elder is commonly found. Indeed one of these elder lacunae is in and around the New Forest:

So my impression was correct – the New Forest really is an elder cold spot, along with most of the Isle of Wight. Zoom back out and we see that this lacuna is part of a wider band of elder absence that extends across the southeast of England. There’s also gaps further west, in Somerset and in Devon.

It’s not just in southern England that these elder lacunae occur – look at its absence from much of Lincolnshire, for instance:

What’s going on here? Why do these gaps in the distribution of this common species occur? Part of the answer is that, being so common, Common Elder tends not to be recorded because naturalists often focus on rare and unusual species, neglecting the commoners. This form of bias is often encountered when dealing with biodiversity databases – we found it in our study of trends in diversity and abundance of Neotropical pollinators, for instance. I’m certain that this is a factor in the NBN Atlas account of Common Elder, because if we look at a part of Britain with which I am very familiar, centered on the town of Northampton, I know for a fact that elder is extremely abundant even if the map suggests otherwise:

But lack of records cannot be the only answer to these gaps: Common Elder really is not very common in the New Forest – I’ve (not) seen it with my own eyes! So what else could be going on? It doesn’t seem to relate to underlying geology or soil type, and indeed Common Elder is tolerant of a wide range of edaphic conditions: the Biological Flora account shows that it occurs on sandy, chalky and loamy soils, ranging from pH 4.2 to pH 8.7. So I wonder if the answer has a more cultural basis? Has Common Elder been actively removed from some areas in the past, perhaps because of its supernatural associations (something that I discussed in my article) or, more prosaically, because it’s believed by farmers to be toxic to stock, or just not a very good hedging plant?

As always, I’d love to hear your thoughts on this, please comment below or send me a message via my Contact page.

A new study shows how garden flowers keep city pollinators flying all year round

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When we think of cities, gardens might not be the first thing that comes to mind. But these green patches — whether in private yards, parks, or balconies — play a surprisingly important role in supporting urban wildlife. Among their most crucial guests? Pollinators like bees, butterflies, and even birds and bats.

In a new study just published, I teamed up with some Brazilian colleagues to explore how the different features of garden flowers help sustain pollinators throughout the year in a subtropical urban garden. While we’ve long known that garden flowers provide food for pollinators, what’s less clear is how specific floral traits — like shape, flowering time, and type of nectar or pollen — influence who visits which plants and when.

To get a clearer picture, we conducted weekly surveys of pollinators visiting garden flowers over the course of a year. We paid close attention to traits such as the depth of flower, the kind of resources offered (nectar vs. pollen), how closely related different plants were, and when they flowered.

What we found was striking: the network of interactions between flowers and pollinators was highly organized. Plants grouped into clusters, or “modules,” that tended to share similar physical traits and evolutionary histories — but interestingly, not the same flowering times. This meant that within each module, different plants flowered at different times of year, effectively staggering their blooms so that there was always something on offer for pollinators.

Even more intriguing was the discovery that most plants had just a few connections in the network, usually restricted to a single module. These “peripheral” plants accounted for over 85% of all pollinator visits. Meanwhile, a few special species acted as bridges between modules — their role in linking different parts of the network made them key to its stability. These connector species didn’t flower at the same time, which helped to maintain a steady supply of food for pollinators across seasons.

Not all interactions between plants and pollinators are “legitimate” in the sense of leading to pollination. Some animals visit flowers just for the food, without helping with reproduction. But our study found that these interactions still played a valuable role in supporting a diverse pollinator community.

So what does all this mean for urban gardeners and city planners?

First, it highlights how important it is to plant a variety of flowers that bloom at different times of year. Second, it shows that even seemingly minor plants or interactions can contribute to the ecological resilience of urban green spaces. And finally, it underscores that thoughtful planting — considering things like flower shape, blooming schedules, and diversity — can help keep pollinators thriving, even in the heart of the city.

Urban gardens aren’t just pretty — they’re powerful allies in the fight to support biodiversity.

The study was led by Brazilian research student Luis de Sousa Perugini. Here’s the reference with a link to the paper:

de Sousa Perugini, L.G., Jorge, L.R., Ollerton, J., Milaneze‑Gutierre, M.A. & Rech, A.R. (2025) High modularity of plant-pollinator interactions in an urban garden is driven by phenological continuity and flower morphology. Urban Ecosystems 28, 126

Here’s the abstract:

Garden flowers play a vital role in urban environments, supporting pollinator communities. Yet, the extent to which floral traits shape urban pollination networks remains poorly understood. This study investigated how garden plants shape year-round pollination networks, sampled in weekly surveys in an urban subtropical garden. We focused on the role of floral morphology (corolla depth), type of resource, relatedness, and phenology in the organization of interactions. We determined whether modularity and species roles were influenced by these floral traits, comparing if legitimate pollination, illegitimate (i.e. non-pollinating) interactions and all interactions had similar drivers. All networks were modular, and in the overall network plants within the same module were morphologically and phylogenetically similar while their phenology was significantly overdispersed throughout the year. Peripheral species, those with few interactions and restricted to a single module, dominated all networks, representing over 85% of interactions. We found that phenology was related to the species role of overall network connectors (species that connect modules) and legitimate module hubs (species that connect their own modules). Both showed no overlap in their flowering periods, providing floral resources at different times of the year. Each module functioned as a distinct unit, showing year-round availability of resources to support its pollinators. This suggests that resource continuity and trait-based filtering may shape pollinator assemblages influencing ecological resilience in urban habitats. Even interactions that do not contribute to plant reproduction can sustain a diverse fauna, highlighting the importance of these interactions in urban green space planning and management.

Join me for a talk at Northamptonshire Bird Club – Wednesday 5th March

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The first in a series of public talks that I’m doing this year to promote my book Birds & Flowers: An Intimate 50 Million Year Relationship will take place at Northamptonshire Bird Club on Wednesday 5th March at 19:30.

If you follow this link you can find out more details of the talk and venue.

I’m happy to consider giving similar talks to bird groups across the country, either in person or online. Please use my Contact page to get in touch.

Join me for two talks next week: South Leicester Birdwatchers (in person) and the Countryside Regeneration Trust (online)

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It’s been a busy year for talks! But next week sees the final two of 2024 put to bed:

On Tuesday 12th November at 6.45pm I’ll be speaking in person about my recent book Birds & Flowers: An Intimate 50 Million Year Relationship at South Leicester Birdwatchers – details can be found by following this link. I’ll bring along copies of my books to buy – the perfect Christmas gift!

On Thursday 14th November at 7pm I’ll be giving an online presentation to the Countryside Regeneration Trust about UK pollinators and how farmers and other large landowners can help to conserve their populations – booking details are here.

I hope to see you at one or both of these talks.

Join me ‘In Conservation With’ David Lindo – The Urban Birder – Thursday 7th November 7pm GMT: free and online!

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This Thursday at 7pm I’ll be chatting online with David Lindo – the Urban Birder – who is an award-winning broadcaster, writer, speaker, tour leader and educator. According to David’s website,’his mission is to engage city folk around the world with the environment through the medium of birds’.

We will be talking about my recent book Birds & Flowers: An Intimate 50 Million Year Relationship, and the urban birding theme is very relevant as chapter 16 is called ‘Urban flowers for urban birds’. Our conversation will range much wider than that, however, to include the importance and diversity of birds as pollinators, threats to that diversity, habitat restoration schemes, and the cultural importance of flower-visiting birds.

David’s had some really stellar guests on his ‘In Conservation* With…’ series (which he describes as ‘Zoom interviews with some of the leading figures in the natural history sector’) including Kate Bradbury, Stephen Moss, Mark Cocker, Bella Lack, Ben Fogle, Caroline Lucas, Iolo Williams, and Margaret Atwood!

You can sign up for this free event by following this link. I’m really looking forward to it and I hope that you can join us.

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*A deliberate pun, not a typo!