What links Homer, Shelley, Coleridge and Keats, and also Shakespeare and Chaucer and T.S. Eliot? It would have to be something pretty special, wouldn’t it, to inspire many of the greatest writers in history? It is something special. I know, because after four years of trying, I have finally both heard it, and seen it. I’m standing on a grassy track that weaves through a dense, scrubby woodland, home to coppiced willow and hazel, laced through with bramble and other …
Category: Birds
Even the name ‘Osprey’ sounds somehow exotic. These large, fish-eating raptors are truly unique, truly one of a kind, the sole species of their genus, and their genus is the sole one in their family. Or to put it another way, osprey sit alone at the very end of a very bare single branch of the family of life. They may look a little like eagles, they may behave a little like eagles, but they are as different to eagles …
It seems that Britain’s -and perhaps the world’s – oldest cuckoo is back. According to Wikipedia, the oldest recorded cuckoo for Britain is just under 7 years old. At this point, you should hear inside your head the kind of quiz show klaxon favoured by QI or Family Fortunes. Because Colin is back. Who? Colin. The cuckoo. Colin is perhaps Britain’s most famous cuckoo. Every summer for what is believed to be nine years, the bird has appeared at Thursley …
Ever since the earliest days of man, people have set to sea in boats. I’m personally not good with boats or ships – my idea of the smallest thing you should go to sea in is the Isle of Wight – but I appreciate that others don’t share that view. I’ve often wondered how it must feel to be far out at sea with no sight of land, facing whatever the sea and wind can throw at you. How easily …
When I was a child there was a pub near our home called the “Fox and Elm”. It had an elm tree outside, with a rather unconvincing plastic fox in it. Dutch Elm disease did for the tree, and I never found out what happened to the fox, but both were gone after a few years. But the practice of naming pubs after animals is common. ‘The Swan’ is England’s fifth most popular pub name, while ‘The Fox’ comes in …
1961 was an auspicious year. The Beatles first sang at the Cavern club. Suicide was decriminalised. I was born. And a small bird was recorded in Britain for the first time, having slowly found its way over from the continent. Cetti’s warbler The Cetti’s warbler was named after 18th Jesuit Francesco Cetti who, it has to be said, bore a faint resemblance to the bird named after him, although that wasn’t why the bird was named after him: he was …
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