Taken from virtually the same position as the “Winterlake” shot above.

This is one of a pair of Mistle Thrushes nesting in a very old Horse-Chestnut tree in a village a few miles down the road from me. I spotted this one on a telegraph wire and stopped to take a few pictures. It was a very warm day in May and the bird had ruffled up its feathers to cool itself down a bit. It was then that the other bird, sitting on the nest concealed in the tree, started kicking up a real fuss with the arrival of a pair of Magpies. This caused our sunbathing friend to come very…

Mmm….Every now and again I get the urge to go all arty with my photographs, you know the kind of thing….lots of soft focus, subtle luminosity, blended tones….Well, I should know better really because this is the type of thing that nearly always happens no matter how hard I try!

It’s been six months since I’ve added anything new to any of my websites (I’ve been pretty busy doing new ranger stuff mostly) which means that I have literally hundreds of summer and autumn-type photos that, ordinarily, would have made it onto one or other of said sites, but are now unlikely to do so simply because it takes about fifteen minutes on average to prepare, upload, install and caption just a single image and sometimes I can feel my life just slipping away!

This reminds me of that tower….You know the one….Designed by that guy who did the other one as well for the city in thingummy….Some time ago now it was.

I stood and watched this extremely devoted pair of Magpies for more than half-an-hour today (3rd March) amidst the early blossom of an Evesham Vale apple orchard. Magpies are usually cast as the “villian” of the piece because of their tendency to predate the eggs and young of countless other bird species (although such behaviour has been proven by several agencies not to have any really detrimental effect on the population numbers of their victims). However, the ultra-vigilant and…

….during her very first outing in her brand-new, all-weather, all-terrain work harness….and don’t worry, I’ve now adjusted the straps so that they wont come loose.

I just don’t understand why spending a long, cold, very wet, late November night in the middle of a vast, creaky old forest alive with spooky, inexplicable noises together with a damp, farty Labrador in the cramped confines of a tiny bivi-tent isn’t a much more popular pastime with almost everyone.

And thus the canopy above your head
Down to the woodland floor will shed
Its million leaves that you may tread
More softly now 'midst shades of red

A single, hastily scribbled verse by Daisy W (my Mum) written in pencil on the back of a page torn from a wallpaper sample catalogue circa 1939/1940. She would have been somewhere in her mid-teens.

The more I look at it, the more I think the centre of this flower looks like the top of Action Man’s head!

“Those who contemplate the beauty of theEarth find reserves of strength that willEndure as long as life lasts” (Rachel Carson from “Silent Spring”)

Sounds like a 1970s folk band album title. Meanwhile, a female Bombus terrestris or a female rupestris maybe?

On a day when football matches were being cancelled all over the UK due to the unusually wet weather, I managed to get soaked at least four times! Meanwhile, this picture isn’t an old-fashioned sepia print, it’s just a product of still more strange light effects that seem so common of late! It’s almost as if we’ve gone back in time to the 1940s and 50s, to when people were so poor they could only afford to be in black and white….or earlier still, to when the world…