Latest news with #GilbertWhite
Telegraph
3 days ago
- General
- Telegraph
The Government needs a new plan for stopping small boat crossings
SIR – Chloe Dalton's book, Raising Hare (Features, May 28), is undoubtedly a remarkable account of her relationship with an orphaned leveret, but her petition seeking a closed season for hares is unfortunately a distraction from better steps that can be taken to ensure the hare population flourishes. The 80 per cent decline in UK hare numbers in the past century was most marked following the world wars, as game shooting and the number of gamekeepers dwindled; fortunately, while population density varies widely across the UK, it has been largely stable since the 1990s, and the hare remains a common animal. In some areas, mostly in the east, it is very numerous indeed, and needs regulation. Elsewhere, smaller populations are largely cherished. Work by the Game and Wildlife Conservation Trust has identified the cornerstones to a thriving hare population – chiefly predator control and the provision of year-round food supply and shelter. Ensuring that government schemes continue to support the latter should be a far more pressing concern than a campaign for a close season, which may have the unintended consequence of encouraging pre-emptive culls where hare numbers might cause problems, removing the ability to address crop damage only as it arises. Matthew Higgs Leighton Buzzard, Bedfordshire SIR – Chloe Dalton's account of raising a new-born leveret is heart-warming, but she is not alone in having done this. Gilbert White, in his Natural History of Selborne (1789), records an extraordinary example of inter-species nurturing. A friend had 'a little helpless leveret' brought to him, which his servants began raising with spoonfuls of cow's milk. But it soon disappeared, and was assumed to have been 'killed by some cat or dog'. Not at all. At about the time of the leveret's disappearance, the same friend had 'dispatched' the latest litter of his pet cat, no doubt by drowning, and about a fortnight later, while sitting in his garden one evening, 'he observed the cat, with tail erect, trotting towards him, and calling with little short inward notes of complacency, such as they use towards their kittens, and something gamboling after, which proved to be the leveret that the cat had supported with her milk, and continued to support with great affection. Thus was a graminivorous animal nurtured by a carnivorous and predaceous one!' Hugh Keyte London SE1 SIR – I heard Chloe Dalton's book read on BBC Radio 4, and enjoyed it with friends in my book group. I now have items in my home and garden displaying hares, and would support any charity protecting them. Thank you, Chloe, for Raising Hare. Cathy Gooding
CBS News
07-05-2025
- CBS News
6 suits worth $3,600 meant for boys in mentorship program stolen off Boston doorstep
Six suits meant for members of a mentorship program for young men were stolen off a porch in Boston's Dorchester neighborhood. Graduates of the Follow Suit mentorship program often leave with some confidence, financial literacy skills, and a brand new custom-tailored suit. "So it's their suit, they picked out what color they want, they picked out the fabric they want, they picked out the pattern they want, so it's their suit," said organizer Anthony Thompson. Members of the Fellow Suit mentorship program wearing their custom-designed suits. Follow Suit 6 custom-designed suits stolen off doorstep However, six of their recent graduates won't be getting the chance to show off their new duds like previous students after Thompson said a porch pirate took the package containing their suits off the doorstep of one of the program organizers, Gilbert White. "I was alerted that it was delivered, I came downstairs and the package was gone," said White. He's in charge of helping the kids pick out their suits, and said one of the biggest challenges now is figuring out how to replace them. "That's a hit to our budget that we have to now replenish in order to remake those suits," said White. Asking for suits to be returned White estimated those six suits total about $3,600 and they are considering this theft a total loss. Not just for them, but for the kids as well. "It's still a hard hit because like you said, the kids have to dedicate their self to coming every Saturday for seven weeks, so then they have to wait another two, three weeks until the suits are completed, so now you're looking into 10 weeks and now there's no suits for the kids so now they're going to be waiting even longer," said Thompson. White told WBZ-TV they're hoping the suits will be returned. "So we're not looking at trying to put anybody behind bars or anything we really just want the suits for these young people in the program that we served," said White.
The Guardian
30-04-2025
- General
- The Guardian
Country diary: A fishing reel, digital noise … the grasshopper warbler is a bird for every age
A late walk along the clifftops to where the fulmars nest. It's mildish for a north-east April evening, but a purposeful sort of southerly is blowing hard up the coast. The fulmars, dropping and rising from their nesting ledges, show me what they can do, riding the back of the wind, wings stiff like Stuka bombers: zoooom, they go, in raking diagonals across the parallel of the cliff edge. In the grass fields and turned soil on the other side of the path, beneath the shivering hawsers of the Old Hartley communication masts, there's a covey of grey partridges. They are red-listed birds, endangered, but they don't seem to know it: they fuss and bicker, scuttle grouchily through the clods, and now and then straighten up to give a call – a curious, ratcheting cluck-cum-squawk like something you might wring out of a rusted-up old item of machinery. Then, another noise, a bit further along, coming from the willows. At first I think it's a farmer's electric fence playing up. Then I realise it must be someone concealed in the willows operating an old-fashioned telex machine or perhaps a vidiprinter. Only after a moment's more listening do I realise that it's the high, pinging, oddly inorganic song of a grasshopper warbler, just returned from winter holidays in Africa. In the 18th century, Gilbert White's neighbours took the sound for the chirp of some sort of insect; bird books from the last century typically liken it to a unspooling fishing reel. Today it's difficult not to hear something digital in the sound. I don't see it, of course. Like most warblers, the grasshopper warbler is a champion skulker; it also has a notable ability to 'throw' its voice and send pursuers stumbling off into the wrong patch of undergrowth altogether. After a minute or so, it's gone. Just the choleric cranking of the partridges and the songs of dusk skylarks, somewhere up there. On the walk back, I see something lying dead in the grass. I'm afraid that it's a gull marked with black oil – but when I get nearer I find that it's a grey heron, great bill turned away from me, plumage worried by the wind. Under the Changing Skies: The Best of the Guardian's Country Diary, 2018-2024 is published by Guardian Faber; order at and get a 15% discount
