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 …
Category: Birds
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 …
Sometimes I set out to see things, and sometimes things just turn up. Today was a bit of both. The thing I’d set out to see was a Garganey. A what? A Garganey. Which despite sounding like something you’d do at the dentist is actually a type of duck. We’re all familiar with the ubiquitous mallard, a bird that doesn’t get the credit it deserves for its brilliant, iridescent colouring simply because it is so well-known. But Britain has (whisper …
My memory could be charitably described as ‘shocking’. So like many people, I rely on mnemonics to help me. But mine are always, for some reason, the opposite way around to the way you’d expect. On wiring plugs, I remember that Brown has got an “n” in it for neutral – so it isn’t, it’s live. It works really well – as long as you remember the last bit. My mnemonic for telling weasel and stoats apart is that a …
Metaphors for lapwings are getting harder to find. That’s because these days, retro games aside, the sort of electronic bleeps, pings and whistles that handheld game consoles used to make have been pretty much consigned to history, and what else can you possibly compare the sound of a group of lapwing to? Perhaps a Pachinko game parlour or the floor of a Las Vegas Casino? You get the idea. I was at Wiltshire Wildlife Trust’s Langford Lakes reserves recently, watching …
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