A good 39 years ago we were in Shetland with light in the sky at mid-summer midnight, noisy Oystercatchers and a very territorial ram This is going back a few years, 39 in fact to June 1983. We were going to Shetland for a couple of weeks isolated self-catering with wildlife, [...]
Earlier this year, just in time for spring, I completed an early version of my book 1001 Species: A Natural History of a Small Town and offered it to the public as free PDF download. It enjoyed moderate success in the very small and rather niche market it was offered to and [...]
The five day Nature Conservancy Canada Bioblitz ended last night and we came in eighth out of 1788 participants (8/1788). That's two spots down the league table from last year but at 249 species we increased our total by 32 ... eighth place out of all of Canada. Must say we are [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
I am an inveterate keeper of lists of just about everything other than train numbers (you need to have grown up in England in the fifties to understand that) - but mostly lists of birds and plants that we have seen and enjoyed. After over 20 years of wildlifing around the western end [...]
We spent this sunny morning wandering in the arboretum. The leaves have barely started to appear until the last day or two and so the forest floor is covered with ephemeral species flowers and simply glorious. It will only be like this for a week or so now and the weather forecast [...]
Temperatures have been up and down like a yo-yo recently and after a bit of snow last night this morning was one of the warmer times so the snow was giving off "snow mist" with a white hazy fog amongst the trees when we went out to see birds. A late lurking Tufted [...]
Snow - then a brief marginal thaw - and now cold again with ice. Only a week though to the winter solstice after which the days begin to lengthen again on the way to the return of spring. Before that, however, we have January and February and serious winter days ahead. [...]