This was a beautiful Father’s Day gift from one of my daughters. The flowers are local to Liverpool where she has been at university. This week we attended her graduation at the beautiful home of the Liverpool Philharmonic, which was wonderful, full of pomp and ceremony, provoking that mix of tears and deep parental pride.
Not only that but she has just climbed Snowdon with her boyfriend – as I said to her this morning, she must be overflowing with a sense of achievement.
With my window open at the Airbnb in Liverpool I was woken by Herring and Great Black-Backed Gulls. I love gulls but it was a raucous racket.
Today the garden is alive with Gatekeeper butterflies. Red Admirals too – the Buddleia is in bloom. I have been visited twice now by a Large Yellow Underwing moth.
And the Rowan is heavy with berries.
A family of wrens is close by: they do pack an awful lot of aural punch for their size.
I am not sure how well this really works but it is a sobering reminder of the shifting baseline:
A friend from the badger group reports that five Moon Bears who have spent decades locked up in cages in South Korea for bile extraction have been vet checked and cleared to be moved to Jimmy’s Farm and Wildlife Park near Ipswich. It should be a purely good news story but it seems a shame they have to travel all this way to find sanctuary. And the park has Polar Bears amongst many other animals. What on earth are they doing in this country? I do not like the sound or look of this place.
Jimmy’s Farm & Wildlife Park. Zoo Weddings Events Parties Restaurant & Shops
British Wildlife, volume 17, Number 6, May 2026
Peter Marren is a name which came up on my recent wildlife walk and I knew it rang bells. He is the author of the first article in this issue based on his book The Devil’s Garden: The World’s Most Sinister Plants and Fungi, Bloomsbury, published in May this year. It “celebrates the world’s most ‘horrible’ plants and fungi – horrible in the sense that they possess vicious thorns or stings, smell dreadful, provoke nightmares, or simply look weird and dangerous.” Sounds great – a sort of botanical version of Beauty of the Beasts, for which see Beauty of the Beasts – Animal Wild.
“Smelling dreadful” immediately made me think of durian which I came across during a visit to Malaysia. My dear friend there, Willmie, offered me some but like many I found the smell, texture and taste repugnant and did not try to hide it. It was not until the morning that I realised how badly I had offended Willmie. The fruit is highly regarded and culturally significant in Malaysia and elsewhere as a symbol of religious identity. Offering me some was something I should have treated as an honour.
Willmie died in 2015. This is my tribute to him, posted on Facebook at the time. The bike is a Harley Davidson.
The world is a sadder, emptier, duller place today. My heart is heavy with sadness, but my mind is also full of happy memories. Willmie seems to have touched so many lives and inspired such great affection and respect.
I remember some wild times in London when Willmie was living here, lots of music, lots of laughter, lots of conversations deep into the night which in many ways opened my mind.
When I first visited Malaysia I hadn’t seen him for around six years. I was treated like visiting royalty by Willmie and our friends and experienced many things that I would never have done if we had not forged our brotherhood those years before.
On the first day, climbing a beautiful waterfall and encountering a giant frog … A friend said “We don’t have those in Maylaysia. That must have been the spirit of the waterfall.”
Carving my name into a piece of driftwood. Suddenly stopping the car and chopping me a couple of pots for pens from bamboo growing by the side of the road. Giving me a set of his house keys to take back home with me “for next time”. All these I still have and treasure.
Sitting at the end of a jetty one evening in Malacca eating succulent tiger prawns. “Do you want to go to the island?” “Which one?” “That one over there”. “Erm, ok, when shall we do that?” “Now.” He had already packed sleeping bags and organised a boat to take us across. We chilled wine in the sea and slept under the stars. In the morning he talked to the birds, answering their calls as they answered his. I went for a walk and almost bumped into a tall Malaysian Rastafarian (who reminded me of Bunny Wailer) who asked where I was going. “Jalan jalan” I answered, rather diffidently. “OK,” he smiled, “I am going to the temple”.
Sleeping in the forest, the night alive and loud with the whoops and cries of birds and monkeys, whilst Willmie played guitar and sang, in Malay, Bob Dylan’s “Forever Young” to me.
These things and many more I will never forget. Such a kind and generous soul who always brought presents (a hammock was one) for my children, to whom he was unofficial godfather, when he came to the UK, even on that epic bike trip when he surely could have done without the extra weight. We’d have a rough idea of when he might be coming but he would still manage to pop up somewhat unexpectedly, to our joy and delight.
I am struggling to believe that you are really gone my dear, sweet brother, gentle warrior, soul rebel. Rest in peace.
I still miss him hugely. We once went so see Ruby Turner (we went to many gigs together – Tom Waits and Albert Collins to name but two). Suddenly Willmie had disapppeared. I looked around and then back to the stage and there he was fanning Ruby with his handkerchief. Bringing books to the UK from Malaysia for me (a long and complicated story) he was stopped at customs. “Are you here on business or pleasure?” “Neither, I have come to see the Rolling Stones.” A ticket was my thanks to him.
Peter Marren writes here about Deadly Nightshade, Atropa belladonn, in ‘Shades of the night’. He describes the Poison Garden at Alnwick Castle in Northumberland which sounds wonderful. Belladonna’s poison is narcotic, “bringing deep sleep, but also fever, delirium, madness and death.” It is however harmless to rabbits, cattle and sheep – but not to us nor our dogs. Atropus, it is explained, was one of the three Fates, “the one that cut the thread of life with her celestial scissors.” The “belladonna” part of the name given by Linnaeus refers to use of the berries as a cosmetic, dilating the pupils. But it has has beneficial medical uses too. The poisonous effects though are dreadful – the antidote is the fruit of another toxic plant, the African Calabar bean. And it is not just the tempting berries which are poisonous, the whole plant is.
I think I will find Peter Marren’s book hard to resist judging by the excellence of this piece. It was – a minute later and I have ordered a copy.
Brett Westwood writes about phoresy (or phoresis), “the zoological term for hitch-hiking as dispersal strategy” focusing on young Black Oil Beetles who get ‘lifts’ from solitary bees.
Peter Norman describes the restoring of Carrifan valley in Scotland and its beneficial effects for moth populations. I can see the importance of moth trapping there for the sake of the science although it often makes me uncomfortable when people undertake it as a casual hobby, sometimes with little regard for the well-being of the victims.
Graham Tucker points out that consuming less meat and dairy would be good not only for us but also the climate, environment and wildlife. I won’t repeat what I have written so many times about this.
Roger Morris decries the decline of Europe’s largest shingle beach, Dungeness. Much data gathering and work is clearly needed but little seems actually to be happening.
The Wryneck, as its name suggests, is a very strange looking bird. It is news to me that they are woodpeckers. Gerard Gorman dives in. They are terrestrial rather than arboreal foragers and eat ants in particular amongst a variety of small prey. They were once common but by 1985 in England there was just one confirmed breeding pair. Reasons for their decline are not entirely clear but the usual factors have no doubt contributed. Wrynecks are migratory with varied and complex migration strategies.
I never fail to enjoy the writings of Simon Barnes, here about a trip to ‘That London’ to record an audiobook. Like him I grew up there but absolutely hate going there now. He is wittily observant, as ever.
“Almost everybody walking and texting at the same time, a practice optimal for neither activity. Mad haircuts. Shops selling seven different kinds of fresh chillies. People holding deafening conversations with invisible partners. Thrilling ethnic diversity. Terrific outfits. Cyclists bursting through red lights with expressions of insufferable virtue on their faces.
Also important reminders. A million bursting bags of litter. McDonalď’s wrappers. Street sleepers. So many people in such a hurry. Though maybe not him. Nine o’clock seems a little early to be staggering drunk, but no doubt he has his reasons. I walked on, thinking about London: thinking about cities. I was brought up in That London; later I lived and worked there off and on. The sense of shock I get on my return is a comparatively recent development.”
He also makes the crucial point that this is not the best place for world-changing decisions about nature to be made, where they largely are. They should be made by people in places where nature is around and right in front of them.
After my Devon trip, reports that Grey Seals have been attacking Common Dolphins, even fatally, stood out amongst the wildlife reports.
In Conservation News the Dartmoor grazing debate rumbles on and we learn that more than 15 million Native Oysters will be released into the North Sea in a rewilding project – populations have been decimated but they are important for carbon sequestration and it is unlikely that they would recover without human intervention. Also that UK caught Cod really should be off the menu for the time being – “they have reached a dangerous point of decline, below numbers needed for safe reproduction.”
Pet flea treatments are harming not just out freshwater ecosystems as I have mentioned but also songbirds. The government has now been asked to restrict the use of these chemicals.
A link is not given but there is a new interactive ammonia pollution map with concentrations of course clustered around factory farms. Our ecosystem simply cannot absorb current levels.
In better news, Cranes have done well in Scotland this year, where there are also plans to help the last remaining Natterjack Toad populations to recover. But the planning and infrastructure articles are too depressing to summarise here and developers continue to regard fines for destruction of wildlife and habitats as a cost they can offset and absorb. DEFRA’s new Farming and Food Partnership Board includes how many independent environmental experts? I hardly need answer that. None.
In ‘Changing perspectives’ Laura Hayter superbly makes a convincing case for rights of nature. The concept may seem somewhat absurd but we have been driven to need them. Benefits have been seen in Ecuador, Pennsylvania, Spain and elsewhere. Could they work here? Nature should have rights for its own sake rather than as only something from which we benefit. As so often, credible governance and enforcement would be essential. “Broadly, Rights of Nature arguments operate under two legal areas. The first is substantive rights: the right of an ecosystem to exist, to be restored, to be free from pollution, to regenerate, and, for rivers in particular, the right to flow. The second is procedural rights: giving nature a form of legal personality so it can be represented in decisions and, in some systems, bring or defend legal claims. Corporations can speak for themselves in court; nature cannot.”
Let there be hope.
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