Continued from last Saturday Walking out from the cottage one morning we came across a freshly dead sheep not far from the house, interrupting the feeding aspirations of a young Great Black-backed Gull and two Hooded Crows as we approached. It was so fresh, I half-expected it to struggle to its feet, but the eyes…
Category: BLOGS by guest authors
Guest blog series, A Break from Humanity (8) by Ian Carter.
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Continued from last Saturday If you read anything about the island of Colonsay you probably won’t get far without a reference to ‘the Scottish Highlands and Islands in miniature’. A cursory assessment from the deck of the ferry, followed by a twenty-minute drive around the island’s only single-track loop road showed why it had earned…
Guest blog – Reclaiming the name by Ian Parsons
Reclaiming the Name One of my favourite places in Britain is the north of Dartmoor, it has a wild and rugged appeal and, more often than not, a lack of people, although this might have something to do with the artillery ranges… Something happened up there recently, as I walked along the ridges overlooking the…
Guest blog series, A Break from Humanity (7) by Ian Carter.
Continued from last Saturday My potential destination for a spell of immersion in nature was, inevitably, chosen from the comfort of an armchair, aided by implausible online images of sun-drenched, white-sand beaches, and idyllic descriptions. The obvious next step, before launching headlong into the unknown, was a dose of realism. I needed to go there…
Guest blog – Progress in the Peak by Bob Berzins
Bob writes: I have a life long passion for the outdoors through rock climbing and fell running. A cancer scare in my thirties made me appreciate many things I simply hadn’t noticed before, from the smallest plants to the gap in the sky from a missing raptor. It’s all worth fighting for and that’s what…
Guest blog – Lynx and young people by Chris Baker
Chris began teaching science in London ten years ago and has since worked at British international schools in Vietnam and China. He is currently Head of Science at the British School of Bucharest. He has written two previous guest blogs here; Natural History GCSE – still a bad idea, 8 November 2018; Natural History in…
Guest blog series, A Break from Humanity (6) by Ian Carter.
Continued from Monday My interest in wildlife is all-pervading. It’s something I’m aware of, or at least alert to, all the time. I’d describe it as a mindset or a way of life rather than a hobby. And yet I felt it was gradually being eroded, despite a concerted effort over the past two years…
Guest blog series, A Break from Humanity (5) by Ian Carter.
Continued from yesterday It was my growing interest in wild food that, indirectly, helped me to crystallise my thoughts on my relationship with the natural world. I had been reading The Wild Life by John Lewis-Stempel in which he describes a year living on his small-holding in rural Herefordshire, feeding himself only on the wild plants…
Guest blog series, A Break from Humanity (3) by Ian Carter.
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Continued from yesterday… The decision to move down to the south-west offered the prospect of living in a less heavily-developed part of the country with a more varied countryside – a prospect enhanced by the free time I would have following redundancy. We rented Blagrove Farm, a house on a dairy farm in sparsely-populated mid-Devon,…
Guest blog series, A Break from Humanity (2) by Ian Carter.
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Continued from click here We tried hard to make the best of what the fens had to offer. We lived close to the vast Ouse Washes nature reserve for several years and delighted in the fact that the reserve’s wild Whooper and Bewick’s Swans would overfly the garden most days in winter, on route between…