I’ve renamed this annual round-up as ‘Encounter of the year’ because my emphasis these days is less about photography and more about appreciating the plants, birds and animals that Britain has for what they are. There were times in 2024 when I thought my year would be a blank sheet of paper. It could so easily be called the ‘year with no summer’, or perhaps the ‘year with too much weather’. I have a garden filled with nectar-bearing flowers, but …
Category: Birds
I’ve just returned from a couple of weeks on the Shetland Islands. Lying in deep waters a 12-hour ferry ride from Aberdeen, these islands are the most northerly outpost of Britain, closer to Norway and Iceland than they are to London. Their isolation, and the food-rich waters that surround them, mean that they are a wildlife haven, home to Europe’s greatest population of otters, as well as mountain hares, seals, visiting killer whales, and thousands of seabirds, as well as …
You can almost guarantee it. It’s that time of year when someone will post a picture of a birds’ nest in an unlikely place – a watering can in the garden, a tyre in a garage. My personal favourite was a family of buetits who always nested in the top of a local streetlight. Another example is this wren, which had chosen to nest between two upright posts of an open-backed bird hide in RSPB Foulshaw Moss. Now it’s an …
Although you might not realise it from the weather, it’s late Spring, almost Summer. That makes it time for all of the new life that is entering our world to make itself seen. It’s also that time when parent creatures are driven frantic by the need to deliver food to growing families. The parents of this pair of little grebe chicks were in constant motion, finding insects and even small fish to feed to their pair. The effort involved …
Odd things, knees, when you think about it. At some point in evolutionary history, nature decided that instead of walking on a single, rigid stick, life would be better if we broke the stick in the middle and made it floppy, and then had to have a complicated system of muscle and tendons and ligaments to make it all go straight again. Why? If a straight leg was too long, surely the answer was just to make it shorter. But …
I hope that I’m someone who never takes the natural world for granted, but a recent experience underlined its importance for me. I’ve been silent on my blog for quite a while. Partly due to working on my latest book, but mainly due to an accident. But while I’m fine now, twelve hours in A&E, and some emergency surgery left me stuck in a chair for several weeks recuperating, with only the TV and a narrow view of my garden …
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