….though heavy rain was already on its way.

Taken at altitude, a Dapperling of some sort perhaps and probably quite poisonous therefore. Fortunately, the Boss employs a number of very clever, mycologically-orientated people further along the line who are far more expert on identifying such things than us and who usually correct our data when we’re wrong which, sadly, tends to be all too often in my case.

“Now hang on a minute” I hear you say….“How do you know it’s not a Cordulegaster bidentatus?”. Well, obviously, the occipital triangle just behind the eyes is yellow and not black plus it has the additional narrow banding on the abdomen not present in C bidentatus.At least, I dare say that such a thing will be “obvious” to the countless, googling, armchair-bound “experts” out there in the ether who apparently take (I’m reliably…

The fact is, I’m not entirely sure, but I reckon it’s probably the former. However, there seem to be things about it that are right for both as well as things that are wrong. Anyway, I spotted it in one of the fields behind my house on the 10th August, 2009 while walking Tess, but was struck by the almost electric intensity of the blue bleeding from the upper-wing surfaces into the hair on the creature’s body as well as part way across the under-wing surfaces.

A long, all-day walk in the high hills during the last week of February 2013 and as the mid afternoon weather deteriorated rapidly and light snowfall turned into a veritable blizzard in less than ten minutes, Tess and I decided to move from the more exposed fields into the relative shelter of a nearby woodland….

I suppose it’s because I’m looking for them most of the time now that I’m finding so many sickly-seeming Honey Bees and Bumble Bees. Their behaviour is increasingly out of character and the only way I can think of to describe them at times would be to use words like moribund, torpid or sluggish. It’s not just to do with cooler temperatures or protracted spells of heavy rain either because other Bees appear to remain unaffected. It’s something else….and…

I grew up calling them “Crowtoes”, but people just stare at me as though I’m not quite all there if I try to use such an age-old country name for Bluebells these days. Meanwhile, if I’m quick enough and people are unable to get away from me in time, I treat them to a couple of  “interesting” facts about this threatened and therefore highly protected little Lily….1….Bluebells are only native to countries fringing the Atlantic Ocean!2….The…

I wasn’t at all surprised to see a pair of Wheatears catching insects to feed to their young well before the end of April. The nest (typically) was concealed inside a Cornish drystone wall that surrounded a field covered with a liberal and (to a Wheatear) highly attractive sprinkling of insect-nurturing horse manure! Wheatears are amongst the first of our returning migrants to arrive in the Spring (usually around mid-March) and tend not to waste any time in their efforts to begin a…

Love them or loathe them, when you hear a Herring Gull you can’t help but think of the seaside. For many people, they are an out and out pest, especially in some of our inland towns and cities where they’ve taken to breeding in significant numbers. Interestingly (to me at least), the claws on the town birds aren’t quite as sharp as those on their coastal cousins and that’s due to the fact that the “townies” spend almost all of their “ground” time…

This is just part of one of the larger murmurations of Starlings (around 20,000 birds) that showed up today to perform one of Nature’s most spectacular aerial displays of mass coordinated flying prowess that you could hope to witness anywhere. In fact, there were at least five times as many birds altogether (it can be double that), but my wife and I had to wait initially for the pouring rain to ease off a bit because the birds were preferring to head for the ground in a nearby field, where…

I guess I’m only putting these photos on here as a riposte to the middle-aged lady who came rushing up to me completely out of the blue yesterday to tell me what an unattractive-looking Labrador Tess is and then to ask if she might possibly be a cross-breed of some sort! Mind you, she couldn’t talk as there was definitely something about her face that reminded me of a baby Degu I used to look after at the zoo many moons ago!

at least