I love these beautiful fish, they’re amongst my favourites. The staff at “Aquatic Habitat” were kind enough to allow me to take a couple of photographs of their own Koi, some of which are worth hundreds of pounds (I actually know someone who lives in the Cotswolds who hired his own jet to return from Japan a few years back complete with a very special Koi Carp to add to his collection. He wouldn’t let on how much he’d paid for the fish itself, but rumours were rife…

Looks as though I caught this little lady just as she was heading back home….She was in a hurry too….I wonder why?

My Uncle Sid was a passionate lover of all things mechanical. He loved anything to do with the railways, owned several motor bikes and was one of the first people in our area to buy a motor car. As I’ve mentioned elsewhere, he was the one who famously drove his car on the ice covering the River Avon from Shakespeare’s Boatyard to King John’s Bridge during the really bad winter of 1963….with me in the front passenger seat! A deed that almost cost him his manhood when my…

The air quality in Cornwall is as good as anywhere in the UK (a great deal better in fact, than most places)….and  that’s why it’s so easy to find such stunningly healthy examples of clean air-loving Lichens growing on every other rock, wall, tree trunk or branch right across the county. I took lots of Lichen photographs while I was in Cornwall this time around (July/August 2008) and I’ll upload a couple more of them when I do a write-up over the next few days.

0220 hrs in the forest and the otherworldly effect created by the lights of the bad guy’s land rover. Mmm….It’s odd how I never see the likes of so-called expert wildlife enthusiasts Chris Packham, et al in situations like this.

She looks as though she’s full of eggs (maybe as many as seven or eight) and just about fit to burst!

….but strikingly noticeable nonetheless growing in a hedgerow, of all places, close to the inland village of Kuggar on the Lizard Peninsular in Cornwall.

….and a special, seven mile yomp over to Rhosili Bay and Worms Head. This was the very first place that we came to when we first started going out together nearly four hundred years ago. We camped in a field in the merry month of May on the edge of Rhosili village and it was blisteringly hot! We woke up on the first morning to find three chickens in the tent! It was also the week that someone snuck in and stole my unopened Battenburgh cake….Nothing else, just my…

I suspect that she could probably see her own reflection in the camera lens and stood there for ages, tapping it gently from time to time with her beak.

Interesting fact about the nocturnal Common Earwig….The front pair of wings have evolved as toughened protective coverings for the fan-shaped hind pair.

One of many Great Tits currently visiting the feeders in my garden while thick snow covers the surrounding landscape.

This must surely be one of the UK’s prettiest, nosiest and most feisty of birds. You will see them almost anywhere along the coast (in the south and south-west especially) attracted to the swathes of prickly gorse that they love to call home. Like this one, they are easily spotted, perched as high as they can possibly get on the most exposed of twigs to ensure they don’t miss anything at all interesting!

Ageing thespian and crumbling luvvie, Mandarin Drake, trod the Shakesperean boards for so many years down in old Stratford town that they finally named a duck after him (or maybe not)! “Yea….Whatever”, (as my fourteen year old daughter would say)….The difference between the male juvenile or eclipse and the winter plumage of a drake Mandarin is nothing short of staggering (see above)! I photograhed this little beauty at about 100m from Beaufort Bridge not far from the…

….or “Mozzarella” Pig according to my Daughter! Remember the Lincolnshire “Curly Coat” Pig…the one that became extinct in the early 1970s, about a year before the formation of the UK’s excellent “Rare Breeds Survival Trust”? Well, that’s what Mangalitzas remind me of a bit. Anyway, I’m pretty sure I remember reading that Mangalitzas were only imported to the UK for the first time in 2006 and that there are three distinct…

….to think that there’s almost as much of this very old treeunder the ground as there is above.