Having finally emerged from the dark hole of coronavirus, I dragged myself out to the little patch of acid grassland on Bramley Bank. I didn’t have much energy for serious botanising so was even more delighted to find a patch of tiny Birdsfoot (Ornithopus perpusillus). BSBI atlas records suggest it hasn’t been recorded here in […]
This was another reminder how incredibly lucky I am to write about nature for a living and get to talk to birding people like Lev Parikian, Ruth Miller and Dave Clark. Burgess Park is an absolute jewel – so good when my home borough, Southwark, gets it right. And always wowed by the page designs […]
Crows nest in the wood opposite our house but this year a pair choose one of the oak trees in our communal garden. From our back bedroom window I can see them building their nest as the leaves aren’t properly out. That nest soon disappears into the green. There’s not much evidence of them, or […]
A male Kingfisher is sitting on a fence post, preening in the early morning sun, until something in the water below catches his attention. After bobbing his head a couple of times, he slices through the lake surface and emerges with a silvery prize. A squadron of Swifts skim across the water’s surface, calculating their […]
I’m just back from a week in Wales and the excitement of seeing unfamiliar plants was almost too much to bear. On a pavement plant walk around the fishing town of New Quay (no, not that one!), I found this Rock Sea-spurrey with gorgeous pink flowers and unbelievable sticky glandular hairs which meant the whole […]
I have time for a couple of hours of pavement plant hunting before I catch my train back from Cardiff to Paddington. Common Limes line the west side of the Taff Embankment and many of them have a mini-ecosystem of lichens, mosses, ferns and other plants thriving on the river-facing side of the main trunk. […]
A sixteen-year-old’s birthday is not the obvious occasion for botanizing, but the celebration a week ago started with a family feast on the edge of a meadow in East Sussex. After what I thought was a decent amount of chatting, I drifted subtly across to the long grass. There were beautiful candy-pink flowers of Grass […]
It’s one of those days when I can’t really settle to anything; much better to stop trying and set off on an adventure. I’ve been planning to visit Beddington Farmland nature reserve in Sutton for a few weeks now. Hackbridge is a rather soul-less and traffic-busy place but, as I leave the main road for […]
If you follow this blog, you’ll know that I spend a lot of time getting excited about pavement plants in suburban south London. Earlier this year, I wrote this article about urban plant hunting for Resurgence & Ecologist magazine. I heard recently that, after reading my article, a teacher has started taking her class out […]
I’m so enjoying writing this series and hoping it will help encourage people teetering on the edge of birding to take the plunge. The next instalment, about bird-listening in parks, is due to be published in August.
The Urban Naturalist 