Author: admin

For someone who loves the outdoors, Lockdown is a trial. But it’s a small price to pay to save the lives of others. As the situation has gone on, I am starting to learn from friends that their loved ones have died. It’s a tide, gradually getting closer to home, and inconvenience is a small price to pay. But I am fortunate to have a number of really wonderful walks I can take. Today’s was around my local lake. The …

Let me be clear –  I am NOT saying that Coronavirus is a good thing. But it does offer us a once-in-a-lifetime chance to find out what the world would be like if we stepped back. I woke this morning to a dawn chorus that seemed exceptionally loud and detailed, full of notes and tones I can’t recall hearing before. And then the penny dropped. Those sounds had always been there, but they were normally drowned out by the sound …

This time last year, the large lake near my home had five great crested grebes on it. Four formed pairs, one of which successfully raised young. A smaller local lake had one pair on it, which also raised young. The same was true for most of the lakes I could reach in a hour’s drive from my home. This year, my local lake has one solitary, despondent grebe. The smaller lake has none. I’ve walked five local lakes, and there …

I care more about elephants than I do about pigeons. As a naturalist that feels wrong, but it’s a fact. It’s a natural tendency to be more interested in the things that are exotic than those which we see every day. Elephants bring images of far-off lands. They are unusual, something outside the run of the everyday. But not every rare or exotic animal lives far away. For several years now I’ve been tracking down an animal which lives only …

Today I went to Greenham Common, the former Cold War airbase that was the subject of much controversy in the 1990s when US forces stored nuclear-tipped cruise missiles there. The weapons have long since gone, and after the US withdrew, the base was returned to nature. Where once giant bombers thundered down concrete runways, rare gorse heathland now flourishes, Linnets and Dartford Warblers sing, Adders and Common Lizards bask, and one particular butterfly, the Grayling (no relation to the fish) …

It was a rainy day, and God’s kids were bored.  God had a lot of work to see to, so he rooted around the house to see what he could find, and came up with a packet of cocktail sticks, a tube of glue  and a watercolour paint set he had left over from working on the rainbow. He told his kids to entertain themselves and see what they could come up with he was working. And that, I am …