See past the sting

This wasp is "sharing" my plate of free range roast pork on a summer's day in a pub garden - with my consent! Most people fear and hate wasps and tend to swat at them wildly, making them much more likely to sting in self defence. I find them fascinating and beautiful and most of my friends and colleagues think I'm strange.

But not all of them! Buglife is running a campaign to educate people about all the helpful things wasps do for us and trying to persuade people to stop swatting them. Have a look at buglife.org.uk .

Social wasps - the kind which try to share our picnics and cream teas in late summer - eat a lot of garden "pests", including aphids, flies and caterpillars. They build intricate nests of hexagonal cells by chewing up wood and turning it into paper and there the sterile female workers tend and feed the growing grubs.

By late summer the grubs have developed into adults and left the nest. The workers are no longer being fed sugary liquid secreted by the young and need to find other sweet feasts. This is when they are most likely to come into conflict with people.

In my experience, wasps rarely sting unless provoked. If you want to lure them away from your plate, try giving them a drop of sweet drink or jam on a far corner of the table. Then you might get the chance to watch and wonder from a more comfortable distance. (don't try this if someone in your group is genuinely allergic to wasp stings.)

A pint of badger

For the first time in my life I came nose to nose with a wild badger last week - just a thin pane of glass between us. My partner had organised a surprise outing to celebrate our anniversary and it was going to be down in the woods at dusk.

The hide was sunk into the earth at the foot of a hill in the woods: a hill riddled with badger holes. Once a large sett, it was now home to one sow and two boars. A cub born early in the year, after an exceptionally hard winter, had disappeared and is thought to have died.

A ranger sprinked peanuts in front of the window and we waited for the badgers to appear. A frog hopped over the woodland floor under some bracken, a wood mouse scurried nearby and tawny owls hooted from the tree tops.

A black and white mask flashed from the top of the hill. The sow lifted her snout repeatedly to scent the air and after a few minutes followed a round-about trail down to the peanut larder in front of the hide. Eventually she was joined by one boar, then the other - both with broader shield-shaped heads.

I'm sure they sensed our presence behind the glass, even though their eyesight is poor and we were sitting in darkness. From time to time, one would stop suddenly and look up in our direction, disturbed by a slight noise - their hearing and sense of smell are very acute. But mostly they busied themselves snuffling in the leaf litter for precious peanuts.

One of the boars stood up on his back legs and reached up with his front paws onto a half hollow tree stump directly in front of us. With surprising agility and lightness of movement, he pulled himself onto the stump and spent ten minutes picking nuts out of the hollow with his snout and claws. Somehow he looked very pleased with himself.

As the darkness thickened, the badgers made a final sweep of the area for any overlooked nuts, then trotted off into the woodland for their nightly forage. What a privilege to watch them from a front row seat. We retired to the pub over the road and ordered a round of Badger ale.

Reflections

Reflections

One of the reasons I started this blog was to give myself space to reflect on my experiences of nature and to share them with others. I took this photo in mid-June at a watercress farm in the Surrey Hills. It was a still, warm day and I had just seen my first wild dormouse in some woods nearby while checking nest boxes.



The woods were idyllic: a tangle of hazel coppice carpeted with wild flowers, including yellow archangels, and everywhere shafts of sunlight penetrating the canopy. And the dormouse we found was every bit as sleepy as the one in the teapot at the Mad Hatter's tea party in Alice in Wonderland.



Somehow it was one of those serene summer days when everything seems to be in harmony and at peace. Beside the pond pictured above, I found a swan sleeping with its neck curled back along its body, looking as elegant at rest as in mid-glide across the water.

Butterfly corner

The silver-washed fritillary is one of our largest and most colourful butterflies and a strong flyer. My partner photographed this one on the edge of a woodland ride on a local common. We had stumbled on "butterfly corner": a crossroads in the woods with a small patch of grassy scrub at its centre, dancing with butterflies.


Common blue, male

This little patch was like a cloud of fluttering colours, constantly in motion. We spotted fritillaries, male and female common blues, a small copper and a handful of brown argos. Then we watched the entrancing courtship flight of silver-washed fritillaries, the female steaming straight ahead, chased by the male flying loops around her.


Why do we find butterflies so magical? Is it the colours, the delicate fluttering flight, or their ephemeral summer quality? Maybe all of these things. If only they could sing...

Speckled wood

Brown argos

Wildlife on Thames

Just to prove that you don't have to go to the middle of nowhere to see wildlife, this heron posed for the camera by the Thames on a busy riverside in south west London.

We also spotted a crested grebe bobbing along midstream, framed by walls of purple loosestrife lining the banks.

Taking tea on the hill later, we watched a plump, bold grey squirrel lapping water from a dog bowl beside one of the tables. And you can enjoy all this in the heart of civilisation and sophistication while munching chocolate tiffin...