Sometimes I set out to see things, and sometimes things just turn up. Today was a bit of both. The thing I’d set out to see was a Garganey. A what? A Garganey. Which despite sounding like something you’d do at the dentist is actually a type of duck. We’re all familiar with the ubiquitous mallard, a bird that doesn’t get the credit it deserves for its brilliant, iridescent colouring simply because it is so well-known. But Britain has (whisper …
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My memory could be charitably described as ‘shocking’. So like many people, I rely on mnemonics to help me. But mine are always, for some reason, the opposite way around to the way you’d expect. On wiring plugs, I remember that Brown has got an “n” in it for neutral – so it isn’t, it’s live. It works really well – as long as you remember the last bit. My mnemonic for telling weasel and stoats apart is that a …
Not my words, and in early example of how easily truth can become distorted, nobody really knows who invented them. But they ring as true today as ever. I try to stay out of politics, but I can’t stay out of humanity. Our generation has a lot to answer for: global warming. Plastic pollution. Knight Rider and people eating kangaroo testicles as entertainment. But the one judgement that will be written about long after we are all dead is that …
Our (almost) daily walk around our local lake produced a variety of sights today. The blackthorn blossom has come and even starts to be going, as drifts of small white petals start to accumulate beneath the bushes which are coated in stem-bending swatches of blooms in what paint manufacturers would call “white with a hint of pink”. The nettles have suddenly erupted, small serrated leaves on stalks already five inches high. In the woodland, the long beard-shaped leaves of arum …
Metaphors for lapwings are getting harder to find. That’s because these days, retro games aside, the sort of electronic bleeps, pings and whistles that handheld game consoles used to make have been pretty much consigned to history, and what else can you possibly compare the sound of a group of lapwing to? Perhaps a Pachinko game parlour or the floor of a Las Vegas Casino? You get the idea. I was at Wiltshire Wildlife Trust’s Langford Lakes reserves recently, watching …
The word is out. Not from the snowdrops, who have been peeking up from the verges and in clusters around the base of the trees in the local park. They are rugged hardy survivors and harbinger nothing more than the turn of the year. But today the blackthorn is in flower. Not everywhere, just in one sheltered copse in the small woodland that straddles the stream. The wrens woke me this morning with a different call. They have returned to …
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