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This morning I got up at 05:45 am to look for the mother otter and her kitts. I’d seen them recently, and as the forecast looked promising I was hopeful I might get some shots in better light. Now this is the same place where, 4 years ago, I left my camera in a hide while I nipped to the loo. And when I got halfway there I stumbled across a mother otter and her kitts on the path. This …

The Government is studiously avoiding the “D” word, despite several weeks with no rain. But my definition of drought is simpler. Purple Hairstreaks are butterflies that normally live most or all of their lives at the very tops of tall oak trees. For the last week or so I’ve seen them at ground level. While this is a wonderful opportunity to see these difficult-to-watch and very beautiful butterflies, the reason you can see them is that their normal foodstuff – …

I’ve been photographing wildlife for a while now, and getting a dry day with no photos is not unusual. Monday was a very dry day, in very sense – baking hot and I saw next to nothing, which was doubling upsetting because I’d driven hundreds of miles and taken some leave to try and photograph several hard-to-see butterflies. So when Tuesday, my last day, dawned I decided to be up early but stick to my local patch. The woodland was …

I spent today again looking for the Large Blue butterfly at a site in Gloucestershire. To my astonishment, I saw it not once or twice, but 22 times over the course of four hours. At one time I saw four in the air at the same time. It’s no scientific comparison, but last year on a similar visit, I saw just 2. A week ago, I was hunting for another rare butterfly, the Black Hairstreak. I expected to find a small …

The Large Blue is one Britain’s rarest butterflies. I’ve been fortunate enough to see it several times. But the Large Blue is a butterfly which, in sunny weather, always lands with its wings closed. And that’s a problem, because with its wings closed, the extremely rare Large Blue looks exactly like the very un-rare Common Blue butterfly, but  – well, larger. But some Common Blues can grow quite large and when the butterfly is in flight, it can be hard …

My ongoing search for the Duke continued last night. After work,I fought my way through heavy rush – hour traffic to Stroud, a one-hour journey that took me closer to two. I parked up and set off down the slope of the Hill to the place where I’d seen the Duke the previous evening.  And as I had the previous evening, I saw it settle three times, but each time (as it had the previous evening)it flew off just as …