We thought you might like to come with us for a short walk in the evening garden at the end of June. Turn up the sound for the birdsong and pour yourself a G&T. This is what you can have to enjoy once you stop mowing your lawn. In a very few [...]
Iles-de-la-Madeleine 2022 There is a small archipelago of beautiful islands a couple of hours flight north-east of Montreal in the middle of the Gulf of St-Lawrence where we have just passed a splendid week watching birds, discovering wild flowers and eating marvellously fresh seafood. This post is simply a brief record of the [...]
The photo gallery from the Isles-de-la-Madeleine is going to take some time to assemble with almost a 1000 photos to process and consider (and cull down to manageable levels) but while my readers are eagerly waiting in suspense I thought I would share an observation of just one species as a "taster" of [...]
After a week on the Isles-de-la-Madeleine archipelago there are hundreds of photos to be sorted and mostly culled. Coming soon, a select gallery of images of the islands, their birds and plant life.
A cautionary tale for amateur entomologists I assume that a professional would never do something as dumb as this. Would they? In a passage in his autobiography, Charles Darwin wrote in a letter to one Leonard Jenyns* that a (bombardier) beetle had attacked him. Quote: " ... I must tell you what [...]
About a month on from the last virtual visit to the no-mow garden. Everything is growing really well and in great profusion. Here are a few images from a walk-round this afternoon. So much more interest than a mown patch of alien grasses. The next stage, starting in June, will be the [...]
Our front garden does not get the attention it perhaps should, given that it it what people see as they pass by. When we came here 24 years ago it was fairly open with one large paper birch tree at the northern edge (that tree was what attracted me to buy the house [...]
After a couple of hot days around and in the newly refurbished garden pond with its up-sized waterfall we were wondering which birds would be the first to make use of their four-star facilities. It was going to be improbable that it would be a warbler or anything rare and interesting as the [...]
Over twenty years ago, faced with a large garden and looking for an interesting challenge we decided to install a garden pond. Edited anonymous quotation: I built my first backyard pond about twenty years ago. After seeing a massive pond on a rural garden tour, I was hooked. The sound of [...]
Nine years ago we were birding and botanising in Austria and the Czech Republic with a pause for history and culture in Prague. I was especially struck by the interplay of light on the stone columns in this medieval cathedral.