Here's a challenge for you - have you been paying attention to the UK wildlife and countryside news this year? Review your knowledge with the Ranger's quick quiz of the year - then come back and tell us how you did!

Take the quiz now!

Of course, it would be easy to find the answers using Google, but you won't have so much fun if you do.

The quiz is hosted elsewhere on Naturenet - this blog doesn't lend itself to quiz-type pages. But do come back afterwards, and tell us how you did, and your wildlife highlights of 2009.

By Ruth D'Alessandro, The Wildlife Gardener

Being an earthy type, the Wildlife Gardener rarely gets embarrassed. But even I couldn’t help feeling slightly uneasy asking for a tub of Vaseline at my local chemist. Quite unnecessarily, I blurted out, ‘It’s for my hens’, and then wished I hadn’t . The assistant looked at me blankly and repeated, ‘For your hens?’ The words ‘Vaseline’ and ‘hens’ don’t often go together in a respectable sentence so I felt compelled to witter about rubbing Vaseline on combs and wattles to prevent frostbite. ‘You rub it on what?’ the assistant asked. My day was getting no better. ‘Comb and wattles. Those wobbly red things that hens have on the tops of their heads and dangling down under their beaks. As they are thin flesh they can get frostbitten when the weather turns icy. The way to prevent frostbite is to rub a layer of Vaseline onto these appendages, and, voilá, happy hens!’ ‘Right...’ said the assistant. I’m sure she wrapped my purchase in a brown paper bag on purpose.

Anyway, in our little pocket of the North Downs, we’ve had driving snow, wind and temperatures of -8°C. The town was mentioned on BBC national news as being ‘cut off’ by snow. La famille Wildlife Gardener can snuggle round the woodburner, but what about the von Quarks in their little Foresham ark at the end of the garden when it’s blowing a blizzard that even Captain Oates would be reluctant to step out in?

Read the rest...

A manky old holm oak that's had some very unsympathetic work done to it... a musician with a stethoscope and a pencil sharpener... the ingredients for one of the more unusual musical performances to be found on the internet:

What it lacks in musical finesse it certainly offers in ingenuity and novelty.

The artist, Italian sound designer and composer Diego Stocco, says:

I love to create new sound experiences in unusual ways. I create my sounds from different sources, it can be an object or something that I build from scratch.

In the garden of my house there's a tree with lots of randomly grown twigs. It looks odd and nice at the same time. One day I asked myself if I could create a piece of music with it.

To tune the tree I picked a fundamental note and tuned the twigs by trimming them with a pencil sharpener. I didn't use any synthesizer or sampler to create or modify the sounds. All the sounds come from playing the tree, by bowing the twigs, shaking the leaves, playing rhythms on the cortex and so on.

(From Julian Dunster via UKTC)

Dogs bred to fight, and dogs taught to attack people, are a serious problem in this country. It's even attracting the attention of legislators. Earlier this year in a debate in the House of Lords, Lord Redesdale said:

This is an animal welfare problem and a growing social problem. Intimidation by dogs is now seen as an anti-social behaviour issue.

Dog fighting is a serious criminal issue in urban areas - a BBC report described how

Young men openly parade their illegal pit bull terriers saying how police cannot tell the difference - while the police with stretched resources can only play a limited role in tackling the problem.

What the Ranger didn't realise is how this problem is affecting the urban forest. Remarkably, a growing number of casualties in the dog wars appear to be trees.

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