EnviroSpin Watch

Bats, birds, and blustery wind farms.....

For today's 'Home Planet' programme on BBC Radio 4, listen here (if you are in the UK, it is broadcast every Tuesday afternoon at 15.02 GMT on BBC Radio 4; if you are outside the UK, you may still listen to it, online, via the BBC 'Home Planet' Web Page: (a) on the day in question, choose the 'Listen Live' button; or, (b) for one week after the first broadcast, choose the 'Listen Again' button; or, (c) after one whole week, select the relevant date under 'Previous Programmes'.). Today, you get Stotty et al. on bats and wind farms, anaerobic digestion, foam, and birds on one leg! Drunken redshanks all round!

Philip, balancing on one leg with his eyes closed. Ooops! The birds have it! Tweet!

Your Sunday meditations.....

Four quotations from Anton Chekhov (1860 - 1904):

"A writer must be as objective as a chemist ... he must know that dung-heaps play a very respectable part in a landscape...".

"Pishchik (to Ranyevskaya) [both landowners]: How was it in Paris, then? Did you eat frogs?
Ranyevskaya: I ate crocodiles."

"Lopakhin [the businessman]: Up to now in the countryside we've had only gentry and the peasants. But now a new class has appeared - the summer countrymen. Every town now, even the smallest, is surrounded with summer cottages. And we may assume that over the next twenty years or so our summer countryman will be fruitful and multiply exceedingly. Now he merely sits on his verandah and drinks tea, but you know it may come to pass that he'll put his couple of acres to some use, and start to cultivate them. And then this old cherry orchard of yours will become happy and rich and luxuriant..."

"Silence descends, and the only thing that can be heard, far away in the orchard, is the thudding of the axe."

Philip, looking for the cherry blossom to clean his shoes.