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I recently did a three-hour round trip in order to photograph a specific damselfly – the Southern Damselfly. It’s nothing special to look at (below), and at a first glance you could mistake it for one of several other species.  But it is a distinct species, and to me that lent it a value that it might not otherwise have. I was lucky to find it so close to my home – the next nearest known location is an eight-hour …

Evolution is often seen as a meaningful process. As Simon Barnes noted in his book “Ten Million Aliens”, Mankind is often regarded as being the pinnacle of evolution of the ape family, as if evolution has been constantly working hard to achieve this level of perfection. It’s nonsense of course – you only have to look at certain politicians to see that Mankind has some way to go in evolutionary terms. But it’s also a mistake to think that evolution …

One of the joys the study of the natural world brings is that there’s always a new fact waiting to be learned. I thought a knew quite a lot about the large blue butterfly. I knew that it was extinct in the UK. I know that it was reintroduced. I know that its caterpillars rely on a specific species of myrnica red ant, which take the caterpillar into their nest and feed it. They do so because  the caterpillar mimics …

This is Colin. He is probably the UK’s (and perhaps the world’s) most famous Cuckoo. He lives on Thursely Common, in Surrey. But only some of the time Cuckoos like to travel. With enviable commonsense, Cuckoos spend the British winter far from our shores, in Central Africa, where they pass the time eating. Interestingly, one thing they don’t do in Africa, is say “Cuckoo”. The call so familiar to us as a harbinger of Spring  is a mating call, and …

I recently went in search of a creature I’ve never seen before, with the delightful name of the “Grizzled Skipper”. To me, that conjures up images of Captain Birdseye, or maybe Captain Barbarosa in the Pirates of the Caribbean films. But no,the “Grizzled Skipper” is actually a small, dark-grey-to-black butterfly. Now this butterfly is one of a family of Skippers, and it has a fairly rough-and-ready look, so I suppose that “Grizzled Skipper” could make sense in some ways, but …

I went to check on some common lizards recently, in an area of Somerford Common, Wiltshire, where I’ve seen them many times. My heart sank when I saw the notices from the Forestry Commission, advising that they they were thinning out the trees. They had done that recently in areas of Savernake Forest, changing dark woodland full of brambles and ferns into open, sunlit spaces dotted with rather lonely trees and devoid of the Fallow Deer that I’d gone there …