I remember reading somewhere that it would take a thousand Honey-Bees working flat out for an entire day to collect enough pollen to make just one teaspoonful of honey! Mmm….So why don’t they get theirs from the shop like everbody else? That’s Bees for you I guess!

Currently flooding its banks, the normal course of the Swillgate which flows at the rear of Tewkesbury Abbey, is marked by the pollarded Willow trees to the right of the picture. The building in the distance meanwhile, is the supposedly haunted Holm Hospital, formerly the Tewkesbury Workhouse, but now converted to private apartments.

I don’t sleep much at night and that’s when I tend to do most of the work on my websites, but sometimes I don’t sleep at all and then I pass the hours either working on here or reading. On the other hand, I might just grab the NVE and go for a walk in the woods in search of Owls, Bats and Badgers. I’ve always got a camera with me as well of course, even at night and that’s when I usually try my hand at night photography….er, at night!

This is a photo from deep within my forbidden archives….one that I took last Summer, but then forgot all about….Hundreds of these tiny star-shaped flowerettes combine to make one huge Alium bloom and when I happened to notice two of them growing side by side in the garden of a house situated not far from the Lost Gardens of Heligan in Cornwall (what’s all the fuss about? I found them straight away!) I decided to stop and ask the the owner of the property, a slightly top-heavy lady who was, at that moment, down on her hands and knees clipping the edges of her lawn, if I might be allowed to take a picture or two….“That’s a lovely pair of Gigantiums you’ve got there….Would you mind awfully if take a photograph?” I asked politely and then just about managed to get one shot away before being forced to hit the ground fast and hard as a considerably less than lovely pair of garden shears embedded themselves with a “thunk” into the trunk of a pretty Japonica tree exactly on a level with where my head had just been….No….hang on….wait a minute though….I think it might all have been a dream!

I just thought I’d add this picture of a Common Reed to the “Home” page of this site to compliment the ones I’ve uploaded on the “Home” page of the other site.

As a boy growing up in the 1950s, this was one of my absolute favourite woodlands and a place where I collected many of the fascinating bits and pieces for my school’s nature table (of which I was in sole charge simply because I was often a very difficult and occasionally violent child and it kept me quiet)!Today however, about three-quarters of this two acre site (it covered about five acres back then) stands in at least half a metre of water throughout the Winter months and well into the Spring….In fact, it hasn’t actually been completely free of water since the floods of July 2007!

Looking like a cross between the end slice of a crusty loaf and a piece of fried Cod, this topside fragment of Bracken Fungus was one of many such pieces scattered along a canal tow-path. As far as I could tell, the original fungus had been about the size of a very large, kidney-shaped dinner-plate, but had obviously suffered at the hands of some complete idiot totally incapable of appreciating the structure and complexity of a thing like this!Meanwhile, note the little holes dotted here and there on the surface and which, I’d guess, were created by some kind of insect larvae finding their way to the surface from deep inside or possibly by something burrowing into it from the outside….I did check by trying to find the ends of the holes, but whatever they were, they had long gone!

Now what kind of a person is sad enough to have, of all things, a favourite field?Well, I do and this is about one twentieth of it! I think that even the best of craftspersons have a bit to go yet beforethey can produce filigree work as beautiful and intricate as this! Dedicated to all those birders out there who get just a little bit too anal about it all!

In the universal language of flowers, the white Chrysanthemum supposedly signifies “truth”, the red version represents “lurve” and the yellow one means “slighted lurve”. Chrysanths in general, on the other hand, are said to signify both “cheerfulness” and “profound friendship"Well, I went to a wedding a few years ago where yellow Chrysanthemums had been provided for all the principal players to wear as button-holes instead of red or white Carnations. Thinking it was slightly odd, I asked the bride’s mother if she thought that yellow might not be an altogether appropriate colour for a wedding and she replied that everybody else used either red or white Carnations and that yellow Chrysanthemums were, as she put it, “tastefully different”!It was one of those big, expensive, very showy and massively OTT weddings with top-hats, horse-drawn carriages and a five-star hotel reception, so I couldn’t understand why one of the outrageously expensive wedding-planner-type people they’d employed to organize the entire thing hadn’t pointed it out.Perhaps there was an element of prophecy about it though because, less than two years and a beautiful ten month-old daughter later, the happy couple were sadly divorced and living with new partners!My own wedding, on the other hand, is undoubtedly worth a chapter all to itself on “Slices” and would probably read like a script from a 1970s “Carry-On” film.For example….my wife’s eighty year-old little Granny (a kind of dottier and more short-sighted version of Esma Cannon) managed to get lost going to the loo at the reception. Unfortunately, there were two wedding receptions going on in the hotel at the same time and she mistakenly ended up at Lord Somebody or other’s very posh version. By the time we finally found her, she’d already finished her lobster bisque starter and begun the Steak Dianne main course!She explained later that she’d just wandered in and thought that because there was obviously a wedding reception going on, then it had to be the right one! The hotel staff meanwhile, compounded the situation by thinking they’d made a simple mistake with the number of place-settings and kindly set an extra one for her….on the groom’s side!She said that, although she hadn’t recognized anyone sitting around her, she’d merely assumed that they must all be related to me. However, she hadn’t been able to work out why, from her position at the back of the room, I appeared to have not only changed my suit for some reason, but to have shrunk in height by about a foot all of a sudden….oh and why had I insisted on calling her grand-daughter “Jennifer”? The fact that “Jennifer” was of a similar height and colouring to that of my wife hadn’t exactly helped either!Looking back over the years at all the highs and lows in our own marriage, I would have to say that the most important ingredient in helping to make it all hang together (at least more often than not) has been the fact that we both possess a very similar (albeit disjointed) sense of humour and a profound ability to recognize all the crazy and ridiculous things that happen either to us or around us for what they really are….er, crazy and ridiculous!

There are something like 12,000 different species of Geometer Moths and I assume (probably incorrectly) that this is one of them (perhaps some kind of Carpet Moth)….the interesting thing is that it was flying around in my bedroom last night (15th January)! It also seemed to prefer landing mostly on the ceiling, where it would then adjust its position in order to align itself with the pattern in the artex.

….Well, what else could I call it? Heading West with just a few miles to go, but that’s the Mother of all Storms just over the horizonand I’m headed straight for it….I was about to get very wet….yet again!

This is a slightly better shot of the female Blackcap than the two I’ve put on the “Brown” page of www.wildliferanger.com . She’s a constant visitor to my garden now, but I still haven’t managed to get a picture of the little male Blackcap whoI’ve only glimpsed as yet.This picture shows the female visiting the small bird-table at the very top of the garden, the one nearest the big trees. Traditionally, this particular table and the bird-feeder hanging from it, have always attracted the greatest variety of birds (probably because of its location), including the more timid ones, such as Treecreepers, Bullfinches and Siskins.Meanwhile, I was interested to note how aggressive this Dunnock-sized hen bird could be. She defended the food I’d placed on the table against all-comers, including Greenfinches, Great Tits and, at one point, a Starling! Only “Stroppy Madam” (shown immediately below and mate to “Uppity Bill), gave as good as she got. After several scuffles however, the two birds eventually appeared to reconcile their differences and decided to share the spoils!Stroppy Madam