The nesting season has begun in earnest and with three pairs of Blue Tits, GT and GTi the Great Tits, A Pair of Dunnocks and DT the Blackbird and his missus already nesting in my back garden (plus a pair of Mistle Thrushes sitting on eggs just beyond the back fence), there’s an awful lot of frantic activity going on, especially when it comes to the Blackbirds who managed to fledge three youngsters yesterday and who are all currently scuttling about in the garden undergrowth or on the patio…

I’m confused about this specimen. I photographed it yesterday (20th April) alongside a disused canal and immediately took it for an oleracea fresh out of hibernation, but now I wonder if it’s actually a paludosa (such is the excitement in my life).Anyway, it turned out to be an interesting day insect-wise because I also saw my first Mayfly of the year and what looked like a female fusca (though it was my wife who spotted the latter no more than two minutes after I’d said…

The five pairs of Blue Tits that have raised or are currently raising families in various nest-boxes dotted about my garden so far this year, have laid a total of thirty-three eggs….That’s an average of six point something or other per nest, of which eleven have failed to hatch….That’s a bleepin' third!

I was just about to get in the shower when I heard my wife calling up the stairs, “My beloved….Come quickly! Come and see….Out on the patio….Bring your camera!“Wondering what on earth it was she’d seen, I immediately snatched up small toweling eight sizes too small dressing-gown and sought to put it on back-to-front like one of those “open all areas” proctologist’s examination gowns….not simply

Now looking extremely happy and healthy, Chicken is one of many Birdline UK success stories. Meanwhile, I have a few old Cockatoo anecdotes from the old days that I might get around to adding to these pages one day, including a very funny JM one!

The Royal National Lifeboat Institution is the only one of our emergency services that is entirely funded by charitable donations. In fact, 95% of the boat crew personnel and the vast majority of the support and administration staff are all volunteers. Between them, they save hundreds of livesaround the shores of the UK every year!Meanwhile, I like to encourage visitors to my websites to endorse my daughter’s idea of donating the cost of a cheap magazine to the RNLI (or to one of the other…

In complete contrast to the Pheasant and Blackbird above, this desperately unhappy little Chaffinch has had a thoroughly miserable time over the past few weeks….His problems began back in February when he broke his left leg really badly somehow (possibly on one of those lethal little net bags that people put balls of suet in and hang out for the birds, but which snag their claws as they fly away)! I’ve fixed broken legs on lots of birds, soI tried to catch him with a bamboo frame…

…have always been lovers of damp and dark places, but some individuals can be extremely inquisitive….so much so that some people who notice these things (usually those without any kind of significant social life….including me) believe that they have quite well-developed individual personalities. This one was quite obviously enjoying a few minutes relaxation in the warm Spring sunshine and refused to employ the characteristically defensive Earwig ploy of dropping from…

“So, if I stick my wet, snotty nose that I’ve just been using to sniff my own bottom, on the glass part of that circular sticky-outy thing on the front of your camera, will that help at all?”

While Two-Tone the Blackbird was struggling so hard a few weeks back, (apparently all by himself) to feed his newly fledged family, it appears that Mrs Two-Tone wasn’t dead after all, but fully preoccupied with sitting on her next clutch of eggs. That’s an unusual degree of overlap (even for Blackbirds), to the extent that I was convinced at the time that something untoward had befallen her! However, it turns out that she was fine and dandy the whole time, but completely unable to…

Looking a bit old, grey and grizzled these days, Tubby has been a regular visitor to my garden for years and knows all the tricks for getting into the bird-feeders. Note the small scar just above his nose….He acquired an injury long ago (probably in a confrontation with another Squirrel) which became infected for a while and could easily have been the finish of him, but he got through it ok in the end! When I think about it, this very large Squirrel must have cost me a fortune in peanuts,…