Published: July 2019
In search of the Skomer vole – again
I care more about elephants than I do about pigeons. As a naturalist that feels wrong, but it’s a fact. It’s a natural tendency to be more interested in the things that are exotic than those which we see every day. Elephants bring images of far-off lands. They are unusual, something outside the run of ... Read more
Now you see me….
Today I went to Greenham Common, the former Cold War airbase that was the subject of much controversy in the 1990s when US forces stored nuclear-tipped cruise missiles there. The weapons have long since gone, and after the US withdrew, the base was returned to nature. Where once giant bombers thundered down concrete runways, rare ... Read more
The real story of the evolution of the damselfly
It was a rainy day, and God’s kids were bored. God had a lot of work to see to, so he rooted around the house to see what he could find, and came up with a packet of cocktail sticks, a tube of glue and a watercolour paint set he had left over from working ... Read more
Small oddities can be big business
I recently did a three-hour round trip in order to photograph a specific damselfly – the Southern Damselfly. It’s nothing special to look at (below), and at a first glance you could mistake it for one of several other species. But it is a distinct species, and to me that lent it a value that ... Read more