It is a few years since Tesco, the supermarket group, had a tricky encounter with a population of burrowing owls in California. The small endangered birds were cited in a legal challenge to the construction of a huge distribution centre east of Los Angeles that now supplies Tesco's US chain of Fresh & Easy grocery stores.

The suit, eventually defeated, was seen as the work not of concerned owl lovers but of an informal alliance between the UFCW grocery union and local supermarket businesses - both threatened by Tesco's US debut. It is a good example of the kind of local political shenanigans and Machiavellian manipulation that keep the authors of Nimby Wars in business.