There are moments in nature-watching when the world seems to contract around you. Your pulse raises, and your hands start to shake. Your vision sharpens, as you focus intently on what’s in front of you and lose awareness of everything else. And if that sounds a lot like falling in love, it’s because it is. I’ve been following a family of otters on some local lakes for several years now. We have this on-off love affair: sometimes when I …
Category: mammals
At last! Something to celebrate. From today, Saturday 1st October 2022, the Eurasian Beaver has finally gained protection in England. It has been added to the Conservation of Habitats and Species Regulations 2017, legislation that now makes it illegal to: deliberately disturb a beaver – this includes any action likely to impair their ability to survive, breed or rear their young deliberately injure, capture or kill a beaver damage or destroy the breeding site or resting place of a beaver …
Regular readers will know that I love hares. A lot of people do. They have a long, often mystical, association with our countryside, being said to conjure spirits, turn into witches, and dance at the moon. The UK has three species – the brown hare, the mountain hare, and in Northern Ireland, (and one tiny part of Scotland) the Irish hare. I’ll be writing about Britain’s hare species in a future blog. To me, hares are the archetypal wild animals, …
The leaf twitches. There are plenty of moving leaves in this thicket just a few yards from my home. A dense jungle of ivy and bramble, cow parsley, willowherb and fallen branches that adorns the bases of some tall ash trees, it’s alive with movement from a gusting breeze that is moving occasional teased-out-cotton clouds above me and bringing the temperature down from hot to mild. The flat white flower heads of the cow parsley jiggle, the ivy leaves flutter. …
Regular readers of my blog will know that I love hares. The rabbit’s bigger. scrawnier cousin, hares are easily recognised by their large, black-tipped ears. I think the reason I like them so much is that hares are tough. Rabbits dig burrows to shelter in: hares scrape a shallow depression in the ground (called a “form”) and then just sit there and take it. Blizzards, torrential downpours, heatwaves – the hare is exposed to it all. Brown hare Now hares …
It’s said that humans like kittens and other young animals in part because we’re programmed to respond to the eyes of babies, which are large in proportion to their small heads when they are born. Large eyes are something we key in on, that arouse our protective instincts. Whether that’s true or not, some animals get an automatic “aaaaah,” rather than an automatic “uuurrrgghhh”. One of those is the doe, the female deer. Is that the reason why I, …
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