Category: Old Nature Notes

Scottish dragons We’ve just returned from a week in the Scottish Highlands, our biennial booster to health and happiness before the onset of another winter. The Loch at the bottom of my sister’s garden...

Winging it I’ve just read a report of a recently re-captured arctic tern that had been ringed in the Farne Islands thirty years ago. Arctic terns are among the greatest travellers in the bird...

Toadstools and tits I’m still in the grip of fungus fever. A telephone call from a friend – had we seen the fly agarics in the Ben Rhydding playing field, just along Bolling Road?...

Spiders and small boys A couple of weeks ago we attended an orchestral concert in the magnificently ornate Leeds Town Hall. In the middle of Beethoven’s Third Piano Concerto, a small spider gently lowered...

Predator It must have happened quite early in the morning. When I went out about 8.00am to fill up the bird feeders, there was the evidence – a wide pool of grey and white...

See bees The little plastic envelope contained a very dead bumblebee. A friend had found it on her windowsill, and wondered if it could be a tree bumblebee, a new species to Britain, coming...

Galls I well remember the first time I saw an oak apple. I was about six, and we were on an expedition up through the fields to the Bleach Mill dam at Burley Woodhead,...

Latest! It must be a result of the long hard winter: I seem more than usually alert to every sign of Spring, marking off a mental tick list . So – a tiny ladybird...

Chick bit A sad story: my neighbour called in bringing two pathetic little corpses, chicks, covered in yellowish down, eyes still sealed shut and enormous beaks. She’d found them in the cat basket. Could...

Shipley blues On a sunny Saturday afternoon in June what better plan than to go and look for butterflies? We didn’t head off up the Dale as one might expect, we caught a train...