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: butterflies
I was on a social media platform a few weeks ago when there was a sudden flurry of excited reports about a large copper butterfly being seen. Why was that exciting? Because the Large Copper went extinct in Britain 150 years ago. Now I’ve photographed every British breeding butterfly, but I don’t have a photo of the large copper. It’s a truly beautiful butterfly, with burnished orange upperwings and spotted underwings. It’s a close relative of one of my favourite …
Recently,I stood next to a small patch of scrubby grassland. Roughly triangular in shape, bounded on each side by footpaths worn by countless walkers boots, it measured perhaps ten feet across with the rotting remains of a small tree, now reduced to just a few moss-covered logs in the the middle. Anyone, including me, would have glanced at it quickly, seen a tangle of leaflitter and nettles and passed by. But yesterday I was looking for a bee. I’m trying …
At the start of every year, I like to look back over my wildlife highlights of the year just gone. With the final release of Covid restrictions, it’s been a year in which I’ve achieved several personal wildlife goals. I’ve seen and photographed every British butterfly, damselfly, and dragonfly, as well as a third of the British list of birds. I’ve taken 33,000 photographs, travelled uncounted miles, and seen 65 species that I’ve never seen before. So what should be …
In 1962, Rachel Carson wrote her classic book ‘Silent Spring’. In it, she described the impact of the pesticide DDT, which was killing wildlife throughout the food chain, but especially silencing the birds whose song she heard every spring. The book caused enough shock that DDT was eventually banned almost everywhere. But Rachel lived in more innocent times. Since the 1960’s, things that were once unthinkable are now routine, and every time we think nothing could get worse, we are proven …
Ravensroost wood, Wiltshire. For all the effort that I put into it, I can never get successional flowering to work in my garden. Yet here in the woodland, it happens automagically; not just seasonally, but from year to year as well. This time last year, it was the hemp agrimonies that dominated, their clusters of pink-purple flowers festooned with nectaring hoverflies and the occasional white-letter hairstreak butterfly dropping in from the wych elms behind. This year, the hemp agrimony is …
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