Urban chickens
January 1st, 2010
It’s perfectly easy to keep chickens in the city, as this video in the Guardian shows. As well as providing a fresh supply of free range eggs, they also make nice pets for children and eventually, when their laying capacity drops, dinner. The family in the video, who live in East London, invested in an Eglu, a highly practical plastic hen house, designed for easy cleaning and egg collecting. After this initial outlay, keeping chickens is a low-cost activity, as their diet can be augmented by scraps like stale bread and apple cores. If you let them forage in the garden, they’ll also eat slugs.
But there’s one thing to watch out for: now that foxes have moved to town, the chickens should be well cooped up at night.
Fears about the impact of last December’s severe weather, the coldest in 100 years, were unfounded. The drop in small bird populations witnessed in the 
The oldest osprey of the UK – and probably the world – has returned to her eyrie in the Scottish highlands. When she left for West Africa at the end of last summer, no one expected her to return. At 26 she’s lived 3 times longer than most female ospreys. In her life she’s laid 58 eggs and hatched 48 chicks, a massive individual contribution to the survival of ospreys in Scotland, where there are still only about 200 breeding pairs. The questions now are if her mate will return and if she is still fertile. Events can be followed on the 
The construction company currently finishing off the Shard building in London, which will be the UK’s tallest skyscraper, recently had to call the council to remove a squatter from the 72nd floor: a young fox. He was surviving on scraps left by builders. After a check-up at the Riverside Animal Centre, the fox has been released on the streets of Bermondsey, having shown the type of curiosity we associate with cats. 
Otters, water voles and fish are all benefitting from the improved quality of the UK’s waterways, now described as the cleanest since the industrial revolution. Since almost disappearing from the wild in the 1970s, otters are thriving, particularly in the south west of England, Cumbria and Northumberland. The population of water voles, highly precarious in the 1990s, is also beginning to recover. The good results of stricter pollution controls and extensive conservation work are set to continue in the new year with the introduction of new European water quality directives. 
