I must have asked a dozen people at random the same question today….“Does the name Warrenpoint mean anything to you?”….and all but one person said “No mate, never ‘eard of it” or “No, sorry, what’s that then?”. The one person who had heard the name before, asked me “Is that where all those soldiers were killed in Northern Ireland?”. She was possibly in her late fifties or early sixties and probably the oldest person who…

I’ve seen these gorgeous purple beauties growing in many a private garden over the years, particularly in the South-West, but I noticed several of them this month (August 2008) for the first time ever, blooming quite happily in a few sunlit, out of the way places not far from the North Cornwall coast path….and a significant distance from any cultivated gardens! Of course, there’s always the possibility that someone actually planted them there, but I’d say that it’s…

Supposedly edible when young (and necessarily white all the way through when cut in half), by the time the little spines have completely dropped off these specimens, they will be yellowing slightly and have become distinctly inedible. Nevertheless, I’ve always been fascinated by Puffballs and I remember how, more than fifty years ago back in my primary school days, I took several mature brown specimens in at the start of the Autumn term for the class nature table (for which I was always…

….Whispering the sounds of past summer days.

It looks very nice, but it’s practically Winter now (10th November) and the vast majority of leaves are STILL clinging to the trees!

This and the following three shots of various locations on Cornwall’s Lizard Peninsular, are all places (amongst others) where I had multiple sightings of Choughs this time around (October 2009). In previous years, I have personally only had far-off sightings of Choughs either above Kynance Cove or as far north as the stretch of coastline between Porthleven and Praa Sands.

  It rained this morning….hard! Not to worry though because that meant that Baz would almost certainly be perching, one-legged style (to keep one foot warm and alternating feet every ten minutes or so) on his most special of rocks atop his favourite Cotswold stone wall. He nearly always does it when the rain is heavy and he usually turns up around 1000hrs. So it was just a case of getting there before he did….which I did at 0930hrs, but he didn’t show up until gone 1100hrs…

Bubble here, has a brother and a sister….Alan and Squeak! Drawn initially by the copious amounts of birdfood, they have adopted my garden as some kind of play-park. Mostly they love to tease my dogs and outrage the Jackdaws who, as far as the “Terrible Trio” are concerned are there purely to provide them with endless entertainment. They also happen to be the offspring of “Tubby- the-Nutter”, long-time resident in the wood at the end of my garden.

I took my wife and daughter for a stroll around the beautiful Batsford Arboretum near Morton-in-Marsh yesterday (14th October). Sadly, it was very overcast most of the time and rained occasionally, but both my daughter and I took lots of pictures anyway and I shall soon be adding some of them to my other website www.wildliferanger.com

….On the other hand, the metal alloy face-plate and thorax body-armour does tend to give it away as an alien spy-bot! Mmm….hang on a minute though, I think that idea might have come from a sci-fi short-story I wrote way back in the mid-1960s, based on an identical bug that I’d examined through a school microscope!

As late Autumn moves inexorably towards early Winter, the sheer profusion of berries throughout the forest warn of a bitter Winter to come, but as an old country saying also argues that “a cold November heralds a warm Christmas” and since,

This is a small charity dedicated to rescuing battery hens from the mostawful of conditions and providing them with a better life.They are well worth a visit and can be found at….www.bhwt.co.uk

“Birdline Parrot-Rescue was founded in 1992, initially to rescue and care for birds in the Warwickshire area.Expansion soon became an urgent necessity, resulting in recruiting various people who specialised in all species of birds from Finches to Macaws.A network of helpers and area co-ordinators, all of whom work from their own homes without payment in order to provide a nationwide structure, was quickly organised, thus permitting the organisation to offer a loving secure home to a wide…

Just as the call of the Herring Gull is synonymous with all things of a seasidey nature, the so-called call of the Black-headed Gull is synonymous with that of the headache, with possibly only the Jay being able to compete with the sheer armour-piecing volume of its nerve-jangling tunelessness.