Art of the Wild

Snow was forecast for today, so when a hungry cat woke me at 4 AM I did what any sensible person would do: I pushed him off and tried to go back to sleep. When he tried again at 5 AM, and resorted to his usual ploy of jumping up on to the bedside table ... Read more

A break in walking and blogging due to the pressures of a family illness and several weeks of interminably grey weather saw me champing at the bit to get out of doors again. Now don’t get me wrong: I like a bit of  bad weather. I’m a fan of the Scandinavian edict that there is ... Read more

For weeks now, my wife and I have taken to walking every morning before we start work, not so much from a lockdown “permitted daily exercise” perspective as from a lockdown “stomach needs resizing” one. We walk a few different routes, but my favourite is down to our local lake. I like it because if ... Read more

For many years, there’s been a regular occurrence when I’ve been out walking. Someone has spotted my camera and said “Oh, you’re looking for birds, are you?” and I’ve had to explain that, like Russel from the Disney film ‘Up’, I’m actually a “friend to aaaaaaallll nature”, and not – most definitely not – a ... Read more

A few weeks ago I posted (“A case of premature exclamation”) about another failure in my years-long search for the Common Hawker dragonfly.  I have driven many hundreds of miles and devoted a great many hours to the search and come up empty handed. But last week my wife and I went for a short ... Read more

I went to Brighton yesterday. Why not? It was a sunny if windy day, one of a run of days of nice summery weather that would have been really appreciated during summer but was rather more annoying now that the schools have gone back. But if you live in the UK, wonky weather is the ... Read more

For over a year now, I have been searching for a particular dragonfly. Irritatingly, its name – the “common hawker” -suggests it is easily found, but that couldn’t be further from the truth,and it’s actually quite scarce in the south of the UK. It’s a lover of pools which have acidic water, the kind that ... Read more

I never dreamt that ‘anal appendages’ would become a part of my life. I mean, who would? And yet somehow, they have become something I not only talk about, but carefully examine. When I started my long, slow love affair with the natural word, it was all about seeing and photographing living things that are ... Read more

One of the things I loved about the Harry Potter books was Harry’s invisibility cloak.  I really liked the idea of being able to sit somewhere and have the world pass me me by without anyone or anything knowing that I was there. But while Harry’s cloak is fictional, the power of invisibility is all ... Read more

I was at the Gloucestershire Wildlife Trust’s Coombe Hill reserve yesterday. It’s a top spot for Dragonflies, but unfortunately it seemed to lack the Whinchat  I’d hoped to see – or at least, they weren’t anywhere near the bits of the reserve I was. I’d had a close view of a beautiful sedge warbler singing, ... Read more