Business, Wildlife and Charity - Can they mix?

Yes and no. Like many things - it all depends!!

Fortunately, here in the UK, much of the new planning requirements place the emphasis on developers to carry out Habitat and Environmental Impact Assessments. Developers live in fear of having Bats and Great Crested Newts on their potential sites for that reason.

Clearly, we can all think of many examples where business is bad for wildlife. Major oil leaks from tankers create local disasters for sea life and seabirds, although nature can very often recover , provided the weather and conditions allow.

Many businesses take a far more proactive response to wildlife, and my own discussions recently with the Wildlife Trusts demonstrate that.

Where I work, we have a strong management protocol to look after our habitats and wildlife, as I mentioned on this blogpost, as to the lengths we went to manage the situation for a breeding pair of Great Crested Newts.

This brings me to the main point of today's post.

On Sunday I will be visiting Blyth Valley Business Park, near Solihull in the West Midlands, and hopefully completing a 10K fun run around the park, which has been sympathetically designed and layed out to help and assist nature and wildlife.

So I will be getting a close up view of 2.5K's worth of it - four times.

I have never done a run of this type, so thought I had better get on with it, as I was 50 this year, so now is as good as any other time.

I have done a bit of training, and hope to complete (un) comfortably in an hour.

I am setting out to raise money for the Marie Curie Cancer Care charity, which is the nominated charity of my work this year.

Here is my Just Giving link, so if you are in a position to and feel you want to, the charity will be grateful for any contributions, as will I be.

And then hopefully, I can get back there later in the year, and get some wildlife images from the Park.

Finally, a quick thanks and acknowledgement to Alex, over at Canon Fodder Forums, who was also happy to post my appeal.

Thanks for indulging me this once - I will try not to make a habit of it. It is too painful anyway.

Martin

Forums Part 2 plus some bad luck

Just to quickie add to Dave's post from yesterday, I said we would also mention the latest EOS Forum that has just got underway.

Just after we started this blog in January, EOS Forums went off the air as a result of host provider problems, and we kept those fellow EOS readers over here up to speed with events.

We told you about EOS Network, and we told you about Canon Fodder Forums that subsequently were spawned independently.

Well EOS Magazine Forum is now back and live, and certainly getting plenty of new members and contributions, so let's hope it runs reliably in the second incarnation.

On a separate and sad news front, I noted an alert on Birdguides Email Alerts in my local area of a Wryneck that was found in Evesham over the weekend. Now this is a pretty rare bird for most parts of the UK, let alone locally. Sadly, the report was only possible as the bird had been killed by a domestic cat.

We are pleased to have Birdguides as one of our blog followers. If you are not a follower or 'friend' of Wildlifephotographyacrossthewater then just check out the links on the right hand side.

Martin