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This has to be the most unhealthiest winter I’ve ever known. If producing mucus were a cottage industry Jo, Evie, and myself would be up for a trade award. Evie, bless her, is drowning in the stuff. Jo is communicating more by subtle inflections in her barking coughs than using speech. And me - me, [...]

At the bottom of my garden here in Great Chalfield is a group of Yew trees. I have no idea if these lovely trees normally fruit so heavily as I’ve only been here since the summer, but whether in response to the coming cold weather or not every branch has been laden with small red [...]

A much wiser man than me once said that if Great Tits Parus major were vagrants to the UK instead of common garden visitors they’d be one of the most sought-after species on the British List. He said it, if I remember correctly, while we were looking at a vagrant Yellow-rumped Warbler which a long [...]

The recent weather here in the UK has reminded us Brits that we in fact live on a fairly small rock on one edge of the Atlantic Ocean. When the wind blows somewhere over that great body of volatile water it invariably ends up crashing into the British Isles, spraying the entire country with cold [...]

I’ve been a little quiet of late (not that anyone will have noticed I don’t suppose), but I’ve been off work for a few weeks (for reasons I may well bore you with another day) and haven’t been returning home with flash cards full of exotic birds and stories of stumbling around jet-lagged in swamps [...]

A few weeks ago I wrote a post about the Common Marbled Carpet moth, a perplexingly varied little beast that though interesting because of its variability (and the effect that has on tyro mothers like myself) isn’t exactly what one might describe as ‘a looker’.

I said at the time that “many autumn moths here in [...]

Yes, I know we’re a bird blog (we are, we most certainly are) but the odd moth post can’t do any harm can it…?

Anyway, I thought the following series might be of interest for any birder in, eg, North America who thinks sparrows are tough, or European birder who thinks that sorting out autumn Chiffchaffs [...]

NMN banner - the Death’s Head Hawkmoth photo (sadly) isn’t mine!

 
Today (and yesterday) is (was) National Moth Night here in the UK, a two-night celebration of moths - surely some of the most under-appreciated insects on the planet. Everyone likes butterflies, right? But MOTHS?! Those dull things that fly into lights and get in your [...]

Sitting down to write this I’m keenly aware of Galicissa’s superb and very funny blog post on APOBPS (which is also possibly the first time in recorded history that Jochen has been beaten to the punch in the ’surreal treatment of a birding subject in a blog’ stakes!) but nevertheless, I intend to press on [...]

The following images won’t win any awards, but I thought I’d post them anyway. They’re of Common Swifts Apus apus, their crops bulging with food, flying with Barn Swallows Hirundo rustica over a field opposite the exquisite manor house at Great Chalfield.
To a local birder just twenty years ago there would have been nothing [...]

When we were first being shown around our cottage by our potential landlord, Robert, he pointed out a large buddleia bush (a Buddleia davidii) in one corner of the garden and asked us not to cut it down. Apparently the last tenants had been a touch over-enthusiastic with the trimmers and Robert was a big [...]

Okay, we’ve had unborn babies and re-united twins on 10,000 Birds in the last few weeks - and now we’re doing houses…yes, it’s another non-birdy post, but I hope readers will forgive me because I woke up in a Wiltshire paradise today, and after the stresses of moving (box after box after box after box [...]