The Environment Agency is calling in hi tech help to track down illegal dumping in a field at Copythorne, Hampshire.

Dumped material included wood, plastics, tar, metals and even lumps of concrete. The unauthorised work was done in the autumn of 2006 and angered people living in the area. Objectors held a public meeting and also staged a demonstration. In May 2007 and June 2008 the Environment Agency prosecuted the landowner, Mr Kenneth Lovett, who lives next door to the field, for offences relating to flood risk, illegal deposit of waste, and environmental protection. Lovett said the work was carried out to raise the level of the land and prevent it becoming waterlogged. He was fined a total of £3,550 for the offences and ordered to pay £2,375 costs.

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There's sad news on the Isle of Wight as the impending closure of the Isle of Wight Wax Works Museum has been announced. This attraction - along with some of its exhibits - began delighting and horrifying children and their parents in 1965, and so its demise marks a loss of part of the background to the Ranger's life.

As well as the traditional historical tableaux, the waxworks includes a diverse range of other collections; most memorably the Chamber of Horrors, and Professor Copperthwaite's Collection of Oddities. In this latter collection, alongside more traditional examples of the taxidermist's art can be found some remarkable freaks and oddities, presented pretty much as one might have seen them in a nineteenth-century freak show. This maudlin-looking unicorn is one of them, offered with the advice that one could capture one only with the assistance of "a virgin, preferably both voluptuous and naked". Taxidermy is hardly a fashionable art these days, and the bizarre exhibits here look every bit as ancient as they must be... but there's an undefinable directness about these creepy things that no amount of photoshopping can emulate. It'll be a shame when they are gone. There's not much else like this any more, nor ever likely to be again.

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By Ruth D'Alessandro, The Wildlife Gardener

The Wildlife Gardener has, with regret, picked the last tomato of the year. But what a great year for tomatoes it has been. I usually grow about 50 tomato plants, expecting to lose 50% of plants to blight and botrytis, but this year those fungal heartbreakers have kept away and I picked fruit from all 50 right up until today. The outdoor tomatoes outperformed those in the greenhouse. Blight has now affected a couple of the plants, but it’s October, and it really doesn’t matter.

So how have I managed to keep the blight at bay? The weather helped. Although we didn’t have the Mediterranean 30°C + heatwave, I predicted a reasonable summer and we got an adequate one. I put all my tomato plants singly in large pots containing a mixture of home-made and commercial compost, and lined them up along every south-facing wall, fence and hedge I could find. I did not put any directly into the veg patch as blight spores can splash up from the soil and infect plants.

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Thanks to Naturenet reader Wendy Varley for this rather impressive example of arboricide.

(To see a helpful technical explanation look at the comments here).

The Wildlife Gardener has already put on record her disdain for the game of golf - or at least for some of its adherents.

The Ranger has some sympathy with this view. Whilst it's certainly true that some golf courses provide a positive enhancement to biodiversity and wildlife conservation; it can also be claimed that some of the most regrettable abuses heaped upon our environment are committed in the name of the sport.

Recently, a Welsh court turned the tables on a developer who'd committed one such misdemeanour.

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What a great night! I promised an update and here it is. Naturenet was very pleased to be invited to the BWPA awards ceremony, where The Ranger used Twitter to report live from Hoopers gallery, Clerkenwell, where it was all happening.

Matt Chatfield of Naturenet chats to host Nick Baker and overall winner Ross Hoddinot in front of the winning entry at the BWPA 2009

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For your weekend entertainment, an alternative way to fell trees, direct from sunny South Africa:

What a splendid Indian Summer we're enjoying. The Ranger managed to persuade junior rangers Bill and Jack that going for a walk in the countryside was an unavoidable consequence of the sun shining - and after Jack said piteously 'Oh Dad do we have to go geocaching again?' agreed that this would just be a gentle stroll with the prospect of an ice-cream at the end of it. For a real relaxing time I always try to visit somewhere I'm not responsible for, usually this means the National Trust. And so it proved again when we set off for a walk up Redcliff onto Culver Down - one of my favourite walks ever.

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