Category: Uncategorized
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Beastly
A review of Keggie Carew’s Beastly; a new history of animals and us, Canongate, 2023. There is something very haunting about the dust-wrapper image. The end-papers are an optimistic very bright green. The author is well-known for her other books, Dadland and Quicksand Tales. This book is moving, funny, sometimes disarming, and profound. With 40,000…
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Amo, Amas, Amat…
Amo, Amas, Amat … and all that. How to become a Latin lover, by Harry Mount, Short Books, 2006. The title is a nice nod to the brilliant 1066 and all that by W.C. Sellar and R.J. Yeatman, the subtitle of which alone is worth the price of entry: A Memorable History of England, Comprising…
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Being a gosling chauffeur; Tumuli and White Horses; Birdwatch magazine and Lucky Dube vs Keir Starmer
I have wanted to visit Swan Lifeline for a long time. On Saturday the perfect opportunity presented itself: a Canadian Gosling needed to be taken there from HART Wildlife Rescue, otherwise there would be just one lonely recuperating gosling at each rescue. The one pictured above was a HART rescue from a couple of years…
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The w word: ‘weeds’
One man’s weed … Perhaps this is a word we should stop using, as Chris Packham has done with the p and v words, pest and vermin. All of the photos here are from the garden. I love thistles, this, above and below, being Sow Thistle (pigs like to eat it), Sonchus oleraceus, which I…
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The Kennet & Avon Canal part VII
Honeystreet to Horton This was the longest ride yet, six and a quarter miles*. Not very far but the first mile or so was pretty tough in terms of the usual hazards of the towpath. Knowing, with my new strategy for the ambition of riding the entire canal, that I would be making the return…
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Wildlife Miscellany: Octopuses, Elephants, Beagles, Swifts, a Badger and more
Octopus and Elephant Documentaries I had eagerly awaited Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s two-part documentary about octopuses. It is the second worst wildlife documentary I have ever seen. I lasted about fifteen minutes, so it’s not impossible I am being unfair. It opened with a sequence of an octopus selecting football match winners and continued with a lot…
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Another Gallimaufry: Tony Blair & Net Zero, Maths is Fun, Dad’s Army, Musical and Filmic Irritations and Michelle Obama
Tony Blair & Net Zero Disgraced former prime minister and war criminal Tony Bliar (sic) has called for a rethink – policies based on reducing fossil fuel production and consumption are, he says, “doomed to fail”. When will he ever shut up and go away? Instead, up he keeps popping, but no one has asked…
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The Kennet & Avon Canal part VI
Pewsey Wharf to Honeystreet Which sounds as though it might be the title of a novel or a poem. On my way to Pewsey I came to a rapid halt. Two tractors and a couple of other farm vehicles were working a field. This attracted no fewer than twenty-two Red Kites. Quite a spectacle. My…
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Brilliant Maps
Ian Wright, Brilliant Maps, an atlas for curious minds, Gramta Books, 2021. Book review. I have had this book for over a year but have only just turned to it properly. I am not altogether sure about it. It’s a collation of maps from the author’s website, restyled with panache by infographic.ly. The contents range…
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Greenham Common, Bowdown Woods
Greenham Common I first wrote about Greenham Common here: Sett survey September 2024 – Animal Wild My daughter has now submitted her dissertation and although it is perhaps not for me to say, it is brilliant and very moving. I learnt a very great deal from Greenham Women Everywhere: Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp Ideas,…
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May bug, PETA, Wild Justice, Protect the Wild, Icefish and more
May bug My son and his girlfriend thought that they had found, to their horror, a Cockroach in the bath and so did I at first, but it turns out to be a May bug or Cockchafer, the largest chafer beetle in the UK. I don’t recommend googling “cockchafer” without a filter. It seemed to…
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RSPB Magazine, Spring/Summer 2025 and a time-lapse Water Lily
Chief Executive Beccy Speight opens with a no-nonsense attack on the grouse and gamebird (what an awful word) shooting industries and the destruction they cause, especially of birds oḟ prey. Heather Mathieson, Investigations Liaison Officer, writes on the same subject in more detail in an article “Stop the Killing”. ‘Birdcrime’ is specifically used to refer…
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Heron
I have already posted these but feel they deserve a separate post of their own. From: The Kennet & Avon Canal part V – Animal Wild). Burbage Wharf to Pewsey Wharf – including a fabulous surprise.
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The Kennet & Avon Canal part V
Burbage Wharf to Pewsey Wharf – including a fabulous surprise Eleven miles there and back, which doesn’t sound a lot especially on an electric bike, almost effortless, but you really do have to concentrate to avoid the worst of the roots, stones and overheard branches and other hazards, such as where the towpath narrows worryingly…
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Gallimaufry: Badgers, birds and birdsong, royal hands, Coyotes, an Oak Tree, a Colossal Squid, a Slow Worm & aliens
Gallimaufry is a great word. A colleague at an antiquarian bookshop was very fond of it and various other synonyms for miscellany. It’s a French stew. Olla podrida is a Spanish stew (pot pourri is the direct French equivalent), also used by the book cataloguer to my mystification at the time, salmagundi and macédoine are…
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Alderney wildlife
Even during such an emotional trip (see previous post) I did not of course forget about the wildlife. My first stop was the Alderney Wildlife Trust’s (AWT) centre and shop. I had hoped to meet the new warden at the observatory as well but timings unfortunately did not allow. The Trust is very active, organising…
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Alderney
The third largest of the Channel Islands, after Jersey and Guernsey, this very special place was where my brother and I enjoyed five successive summer holidays as children, beginning in 1967 when I was five years old. We always stayed at the Grand Hotel (since demolished), which had a swimming pool with a sunken bar…
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Nature Boy
Seán Ronayne, Nature Boy; a journey of birdsong and belonging, Hachette Books, 2024. Book review. I didn’t want to finish this book, in the sense that I didn’t want it to end. It had me in tears too many times to count and from the beginning I was sure that it was going to be…
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The Kennet & Avon Canal part IV
Great Bedwyn to Burbage Wharf Another boneshaking but wonderful ten miles or so, there and back. The new electric bike seems remarkably robust so far, although there were some squeaks of protest for the last couple of miles, so I think some tlc is in order. On this stretch alone, which continues the southward direction…
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Badgers & Development; British Steel & Thames Water; Trump and his tariffs
Apologies for the uneven appearance of sub-headers in this and recent posts, a WordPress issue which they are currently trying to resolve. Development “Bats or great crested newts?” “Neither because I want growth.” This was Rachel Reeves in an interview not so long ago. She may as well have said “money” instead of “growth”. Starmer…
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Collared Dove
An adult pair were regular visitors earlier in the year as usual, but I haven’t seen them for weeks. Then two appeared this morning, but something was different and not just in their slightly fluffy appearance. They were shy and reticent, staying in the tree. I think they are juveniles and like to think the…
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Rattus norvegicus, George Monbiot and a few more garden birds
Rats Rattus norvegicus, variously know as the Norway rat, sewer rat, brown rat, wharf rat, common rat and Hanover rat. I had noticed an unusual although not unpleasant smell in the shed some weeks ago and some minor evidence of rodent damage. If I ignore it for long enough, I thought, it will go away.…
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The Kennet & Avon Canal part III
The Bedwyns Which sounds like a family name from a Jane Austen novel. Again starting where I left off, there was a surprise under Little Bedwyn bridge. A pair of Muscovy ducks. I had seen a male before but never a female and wasn’t immediately sure who I was looking at. I slowly pushed my…
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The Kennet & Avon Canal part II
Hungerford to Little Bedwyn I started a little east of Hungerford at Lower Denford, exactly where I had stopped on the previous trip (I do like to be thorough), aiming for Little Bedwyn. I covered around eleven miles, the last two on the way back on foot following a front wheel puncture. Recognising the weight…
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The Kennet & Avon Canal, Part I
This is one of those marvels of engineering which we are lucky enough to have running through our village. I have spent a lot of time on and alongside it over the years, mostly with the children. It has long been an ambition to follow the towpath the entire distance, if only in short sections…
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Aristocracy special
There is something very other about this strange subspecies, the British aristocracy, this relic of feudalism. I have written about them quite a lot, but thought it would be fun to gather it all together and recount anecdotes of my personal encounters with them. The Duke of Westminster, when asked by a journalist what advice…
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Garden trees, shrubs & flowers, Magpies, Taxonomy, The Urban Birder, Ruddy Ducks and Temple Elephants
Garden trees, shrubs and flowers I have spent the morning going down rabbit-holes. Not literally of course. It began with a few photographs of trees and plants in the garden. I had been in a terrible muddle about the former and remembered the lesson never to assume anything, to question everything even when you are…
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Sparrow with attitude
I do think this female House Sparrow seems to have attitude, as in “What do you think you’re looking at?” BirdWatch magazine Bird Watch magazine is here again, issue 394, April 2025. I think I am coming to an end with it. It seems increasingly to be almost all about twitching rarities. That’s not really…
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Cleveland Lakes Nature Reserve
This is a roughly forty minute drive from me and is part of the Cotswold Lakes area, much of which is given over to water sports. It is also part of the Cotswold Water Park Site of Special Scientific Interest, is Cotswold Lakes Trust’s flagship site and consists of wetland lagoons, scrapes, reedbeds and ponds. I…
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Simon Barnes. How to be a Bad Botanist. Book review. Part II
Barnes (Simon). How to be a Bad Botanist. Simon & Schuster, 2024. Next, Barnes takes us on a walk along an “entangled riverbank”, then a chapter on domestication (mostly of plants) in which he surprises me: aurochs, the extinct ancestors of modern cattle, is an unusual word. Aurochs is both singular and plural but there are two…
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Simon Barnes. How to be a Bad Botanist. Book review. Part I
Barnes (Simon). How to be a Bad Botanist. Simon & Schuster, 2024. Following his earlier How to be a Bad Birdwatcher, Simon Barnes here writes as beautifully, accessibly and inspiringly as ever. He is a very fine judge of how best to impart information and enthusiasm and to philosophise without ever patronising. The book is…
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Coal Tit, Chaffinch, Bees and Worms
The Merlin app identified Coal Tits for me a some days ago, but I only caught a passing glance. Yesterday at least one was back, with the unmistakeable white nape patch and a slightly scruffy appearance. Fond though I am of them, I realised that I am not so keen on worried-looking birds, a description…
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Photographing birds in flight part II
Well now I can’t stop. And I seem to be getting there. Just in case anyone is reading this who has a P1000 or its recent successor and has been struggling as I have, the best settings seem to be shutter priority mode, shutter speed 1/2000, bright light if possible (or else increase exposure afterwards)…
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Photographing birds in flight
For some time I have been frustrated by what I thought was my camera’s inability to do this well, for smaller birds especially, to the extent that I seriously contemplated spending a serious sum of money on something better like the newish Nikon Z8 or Z9 with their astounding focussing and tracking capabilities. A friend…
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Ambelopoulia, Jeremy Clarkson, Steve Backshall, Maria Vincent Robinson, Thames Water, Cheltenham and more
There is no particular reason for the Wood Pigeon photos, except that I was pleased with them when I took them yesterday: the light and shadow in the picture above, the blink and the textural detail. Ambelopoulia I wrote about the consumption of Ortolan Buntings in France here: Spurn Migration Festival 2024 – Animal Wild…
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Oz magazine, Crufts, Penguins and litter-picking
My memories of Oz were triggered as I was browsing through the many profiles of antiquarian booksellers by Sheila Markham, created for the periodicals Bookdealer and The Book Collector. The profile in question is that of Carl Williams, a specialist in counterculture. He relates having sold a collection of protest posters to Felix Dennis, art…
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Guy Shrubsole. The Lie of the Land. Book review. Part II
The Lie of the Land. Who Really Cares for the Countryside? William Collins, 2024. I had thought to use these evening sky pictures purely as decoration for this post, then I thought they were inappropriate since land and sky are in a sense opposites of each other. But then I had the idea or even revelation…
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Bird Table – the BTO magazine for Garden Birdwatchers, BTO News & more
I picked up a year’s worth (2024) of the British Trust for Ornithology’s quarterly, generously illustrated magazine at the recent BTO conference in Manchester. As I said in my report on the conference, they will presumably be changing the name in short order since we are all now being discouraged from using bird tables at…
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British Wildlife magazine February 2025: the rest of the issue
Volume 36, Number 4 Tim Birkhead contributes “A portrait of the Great Auk”, only ever seen by just one or two scholars and ornithologists. It was driven to extinction in 1844 by dealers and museums and it is far from clear what it actually looked like. There seem to be just two images drawn from…
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British Wildlife magazine February 2025 on lead shot; fox hunting and more protest news
Volume 36, Number 4 There is invariably a superb photo on the cover, but this issue also has the text “An End in Sight for lead Ammunition?”, which is the opening editorial piece by Ruth Cromie. We have known about the toxicity of lead for over 2,000 years and its very severe effects on wildlife…
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Fallen oak
Having heard about this near a local farm I drove over hoping for a photo of a massive circular root system, but there are some nice textures here, especially the fungi. Sometimes it’s just the simplest things.
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Bird conference
British Trust for Ornithology, Annual Conference, Midland Hotel, Manchester, 1st March 2025 My first such conference (the only others I have attended have been about rare books and manuscripts), which tied in with visiting and staying with my younger daughter who is studying at Liverpool University, a long overdue but somewhat less than fruitful look…
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Guy Shrubsole. The Lie of the Land. Book review. Part I
The Lie of the Land. Who Really Cares for the Countryside? William Collins, 2024. This essential book follows on from the author’s superb Who Owns England?: how we lost our green and pleasant land, and how to take it back, William Collins, 2019, which forensically details who actually owns our countryside. Now he explodes the…
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Magpies in colour, Polar Bears, Komodo Dragons, Songbirds and Wood Pigeons, and Spring
Magpies I cannot quite believe I had never noticed before that Magpies are far from being black and white. It was only yesterday with the sunlight at just the right angle that I saw the marvellous iridescent blue on the wings and green and blue on the tail. The photo at the head of this…
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Long-tailed Tits
I have seen these adorable little birds a few times, in small groups (they are highly sociable), once at a distance in Norfolk and once, fleetingly, locally. They are not uncommon but they never sit still for long, generally not more than a second. Collins Bird Guide describes them as restless. I had never seen…
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George Monbiot on Question Time, Drax, badger latrines and three animals new to me from crossword clues
5 ≠ 10 George Monbiot is a great speaker of truth. His book Feral: rewilding the land, sea and human life, Penguin, 2014 in particular is simply superb. Focussing only on the discussion of the scandals besetting Rachel Reeves it was almost comical to witness the pathetic nature of the Labour spokesperson’s defence. The questioner…
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Boring brown birds
Of course I don’t think they’re boring, no bird is boring to me, but I have heard it said of these two, a female Blackbird and a Dunnock. I rest my case with these photos showing their striking and complex markings.
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Falcons and falconry
This image of the Peregrine Falcon (Falco pergerinus), famously the fastest animal on the planet, is taken from John Gould’s magnificent The Birds of Great Britain, published in twenty-five parts, usually sumptuously bound in five folio volumes, between 1862 and 1873. Copies on the market today are priced between £60,000 and over £200,000. The copy…
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A few more garden bird photos
I have been trying to take some pictures which are a bit different with, preferably, the birds away from the feeders in a more natural setting, which is of course much harder. The smaller birds especially do not hang around and pose nicely – they usually fly off the second you have established focus. These…
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New Scientist magazine, pointless animal experiments, tractor protest and through the microscope at HART Wildlife Rescue
Returning briefly to Bill Bailey’s book, My Animals and Other Animals, I was shocked to see what he said about Whale Sharks (and therefore all animals, or just fish?). Is our imagining that they live lonely existences just a projection, since they do not have “the faculty of self-awareness”? That is one hell of an…
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Vulpines, vicars and vets, Bill Bailey’s latest book, raptor decoys, zonkeys and Brocken spectres
Vulpines, vicars and vets Vulpes vulpes, the Red Fox, whose clownish-looking but sadistic persecutors continue to hunt them at will (although with a little less impunity than in the past) is getting no help from certain members of the clergy and the veterinary profession. Protect the Wild quite rightly wonders why clergymen continue to bless…
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A few more bird names
Information is mostly taken from the exciting new addition to my library, The Bird Name Book, Princeton University Press, 2022, by Susan Myers. These are birds who visited the garden yesterday or today. Two of the photos are from previous posts. The Robin (redbreast), Erithacus rubecula. Robin is a diminutive of Robert and in fifteenth…
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The Flow. Book review. Part IV
The Flow, Rivers, Water and Wilderness, by Amy-Jane Beer, Bloomsbury Wildlife 2023 This must be the longest review I have written, which goes to show how much I love the book – and all I am doing is sharing the sparkliest gems. Amy-Jane Beer writes about another fascination of mine in the chapter ‘Light and water’…
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Behind closed doors
Doesn’t this crude mock-up of the Downing Street door look sinister? I have already expressed my disgust at the words of Rachel Reeves here: The royal societies: RSPCA and RSPB – Animal Wild “I have no words to express my contempt for dangerous tax liar Rachel Reeves who has said that we need to learn…
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Books about Bird Names
I have often sung the praises of Stephen Moss’ Mrs Moreau’s Warbler; how birds got their names, Guardian Faber, 2018 especially in Animal Wild. In an update to this post Birdwatch, HART Wildlife Rescue and other wildlife notes and news – Animal Wild I reviewed The Vanishing Mew Gull; a guide to the bird names of…
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Schooldays
My blog seems to be becoming increasingly and more openly autobiographical. One of the advantages of getting older is that one cares rather less about what other people think. I don’t have many subscribers but nevertheless feel happily compelled to write and publish my photographs. This morning I wondered what happens if for whatever reason…
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The Flow. Book review. Part III
In the ‘Eddy’ entitled ‘Flow’ the author is writing mostly about finding her mojo, getting into the zone, when it comes to kayaking but here she is on writing, first citing the psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi who published his Flow Theory in 1975, “describing a state of mind exemplified by trained and motivated individuals performing complex,…
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BirdGuides weekly news
Possibly there is good news for bees in the form of a proper government ban on neonicinotinoids, which kill them. We have been here before though, with the previous government granting exemptions year on year, mostly to the lucrative benefit of sugar beet farmers, which they described as “emergency authorisations”, which seems very Orwellian. NFU…
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The royal societies: RSPCA and RSPB. Update
Another e-mail in from the RSPCA inviting people to join the “Big Conversation” about animals. By no means a terrible idea. I signed in to leave a comment and made my feelings about the Assured labelling scheme known in the appropriate section, “Farmed animals and food”. I do not envy the RSPCA Ambassador her job.…
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The royal societies: RSPCA and RSPB
Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer;Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned;The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity. From ‘The Second Coming’, W.B. Yeats. I am not sure I can continue to read…