Wild man a wondering – Week 3
Thursday was our first day out this year and so the first of my retirement. Saltholme was the obvious choice but we didn’t want the obvious, so we had a little walk out in Richmond instead. We’ve walked into Billy Bank Woods before but not since our courting days, when we finished the stroll with…
Wild man a wondering – Week 2
The deep, white layer of frost on the 10th January covered almost everything that I might see and write about, but it couldn’t help revealing something. In a narrow line along the shelf at the back of our conservatory were some small, delicate canine prints. I can’t always distinguish a fox print from a dog…
Wild man a wondering – The weekly wildlife journal of a would-be naturalist
Week 1 (OK, week 2, but let’s pretend it’s week 1) Consistency has always been my problem; my spirit animal ought to be a butterfly. If you’d asked me what I wanted to do once I was retired, I would have said, “I want to write more”. So, now that I am retired I determined…
The Harvest Mouse in North East England
This article is the third update of the Harvest Mouse species account which I initially wrote for the book, “Mammals, Amphibians and Reptiles of the North East” which was published by the Natural History Society of Northumbria in 2012 and is free to download from the home page of this website. It has only been…
Tales of a timid traveller – (Part 6) “Z” is for…
Zanzibar, the last leg of our safari. A place so exotic that it’s got two z’s in it. It apparently means black coast, which it most definitely wasn’t. (For the record it was mostly sparkly white, with little crabs popping up and walking sideways along the sand like they were in a ’50s Disney wildlife…
Never say, “Never again!”
“Never again!” I’ve said that loads of times. I’ve said it at Christmas when I’ve watched the same movie for the umpteenth time; I’ve said it every single time I’ve driven down south on holiday and been stuck in traffic jams, and I’ve said it way too many times when deciding that I should give…
Tales of a timid traveller – (Part 5) “Just so!”
People are improbable. I mean, I’ve never quite understood how something like us could have evolved. The “just so” story is that as the land got drier we adapted by swapping the ability to climb through the disappearing forest for the knack of walking upright for long distances in the blazing heat, with our expanding…
The establishment of the Ring-necked Parakeet in North East England
INTRODUCTION This article was first published in “Northumbrian Naturalist – the Transactions of the Natural History Society of Northumbria” in 2015. It describes the establishment and gradual increase in population and range of the species across the region up to that point. As predicted in the article, the species has continued to spread across the…
Angels unawares
It was St Paul who warned us that we might meet Angels unawares. I certainly wasn’t expecting my encounter, which happened a long time ago when I was a countryside warden. Being a countryside warden wasn’t always as idyllic a job as you might think. I reckoned that I spent a good quarter of my…
The north wind doth blow ….
I’d only seen a Waxwing a handful of times before and then only a fleeting glimpse, a dark shape silhouetted in a winter’s dusk. A few of these exquisite birds arrive in Britain every winter and every few years they grace us with a “Waxwing Winter” when they arrive in their hundreds but, either way,…
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Raven on the Wing 