Page 6 - Mark Cocker News Today

Submissions for the coveted East Anglian Book Awards, which celebrate the outstanding literary culture of our region, are now open.

Submissions for the coveted East Anglian Book Awards, which celebrate the outstanding literary culture of our region, are now open.

Submissions for the coveted East Anglian Book Awards, which celebrate the outstanding literary culture of our region, are now open.

Presented by nature writer Richard Mabey This is an online event hosted on the British Library platform. Bookers are sent a link in advance giving access and can watch at any time for 48 hours after the start time. Gilbert White was perhaps the first English naturalist, whose careful observations of his village laid the foundations of modern ecology, influencing Charles Darwin and generations of writers and artists.  Celebrate the summer equinox with ‘Britain’s foremost nature writer’ Ri...

The butterfly effect During lockdown in spring last year I found and photographed a lapwing’s nest and thereby scratched a delicious itch that has been semi-dormant within me for 50 years. As a child I wilfully, illegally collected about a dozen wild birds’ eggs and stored these treasures in a shoebox in my bedroom. Most naturalists of my vintage will freely admit that this is how their lifelong passions for wildlife began. By 12 years old I had abandoned the illicit ways of my youth, but...

In Field Work : What Land Does to People & What People Do to Land, Bella Bathurst identifies a series of painful truths about Britain’s relationship with its land. This is a country whose self-identity is closely bound up with its agriculture, and yet farmers have, over the course of a generation, become “the sort of profession which everyone disrespected without really understanding”. Farmers are responsible, so the narrative of several books goes – see Mark Cocker’s ...

Tom Fort’s Casting Shadows is an excellent, balanced portrait of fisher folk in Britain Fort’s new book is alive to the poetry that stirs the human soul while fishing.   According to Tom Fort, the carbon dating of fish traps found at the Thames-side localities we now know as Vauxhall, Chelsea and Hammersmith is proof that fishing was part of our national life from at least AD 650. Fort, the author of this excellent, balanced portrait of fisher folk in Britain, goes on to argue that dev...

When an unusual bird publication reached bookshops in 2005 it was greeted with universal acclaim and admiration.

Sunny Hogshaw: this photo was was taken by local naturalist Mark Cocker The mum-of-one, who has lived on Hogshaw Villas Road since 2007, described Hogshaw - bordered by allotments, homes and the railway - as “a little oasis”. She said: “We’re a very close-knit community all living close to the field - if there’s ever any trouble we deal with it as a community. “If this is allowed to happen it’s going to change the place so much - that green space is so important because none of us...

Want to read more? At the start of the pandemic in March we took the decision to make online access to our news free of charge by taking down our paywall. At a time where accurate information about Covid-19 was vital to our community, this was the right decision – even though it meant a drop in our income. In order to help safeguard the future of our journalism, the time has now come to reinstate our paywall, However,  rest assured that access to all Covid related news will still remain free...