You are browsing the archives of 2006 June.

Burnt Orchid Orchis ustulata
Hampshire, UK. 05 June 2006
 
Most orchids in the UK grow from late-May to the end of July: it’s a narrow window, and as it tends to rain heavily here most summers (when was the last time that the Wimbledon Tennis Championship ran to schedule, for example) if the sun shines anyone wanting [...]

Nairobi, Kenya
10 June 2006

Kenya covers an area of 582,646 square kilometres. The land stretches from the sea level (Indian Ocean) in the east, to 5,199 meters at the peak of the snow-capped Mount Kenya. From the coast, the altitude changes gradually through the coastal belt and plains (below 152 metres above sea level), the [...]

Noar Hill Nature Reserve
Hampshire, UK. 08 June 2006
 

My good friend Peter Mowday and I went east into Hampshire to three sites fairly close to each other in the South Downs: Chappetts Copse, a truly beautiful beech wood renowned for its colony of Narrow-leaved Helleborines, Noar Hill, an ancient system of chalk quarries famous for large [...]

I should have been home, either tending to my delightful new daughter or at least getting some sleep. Instead, I found myself driving to Queens in search of a duck that shouldn’t have been there. Actually, it was three ducks, an enticing trio of Fulvous Whistling-Ducks that had been hanging around Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge [...]

Monkey Orchid Orchis simia, Lady Orchid Orchis purpurea, and possible Monkey x Lady hybrid
Oxfordshire, UK. 30 May 2006
 
Today the rain finally stopped long enough for Peter Mowday (long-time friend) and I to catch up with a few of the UK’s orchid species - which for years now we’ve been promising ourselves to do.

We drove down [...]

A friend of mine sent me an article from The Daily Mail newspaper yesterday about the death of a notorious “egger” who had fallen 40′ out of a tree after losing his footing. The story was already doing the rounds when I recieved it and had appeared on several internet bird forums, usually with gleeful [...]