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I got up out of my sick bed to post this, I hope you know. Our brief dusting of snow may have gone, but it was too grim and grey to go exploring in the garden after hibernating ladybirds or flat-backed millipedes. Instead, I ventured upstairs

-ties, but only in discrete burgundy or navy blue, with extremely subtle spot patterns. I am rather nosy and have a tendency to stare. Oh, and I like insects. So when the cry is uttered from the end of the garden: “Weird red bug”, there is only one response, I

The foxes have been busy in my garden again. I haven’t seen them recently, but they leave their tell-tale signs. Occasionally I have cause to curse them, notably when I move the kids’ climbing frame to mow the lawn and find a putrescent latrine

Last weekend was the 2013 Garden BioBlitz, an online Twitter-originated collaboration to observe, identify and record garden wildlife. There is a special #gbb13 hashtag on Twitter, and a series of iSpot pages specially to put experts on hand to help

Although, yes, technically it is a spider, I’m almost positive that nobody could really be scared of the zebra spider, Salticus scenicus. It lacks all those sinister characteristics that can cause unease among some people — it isn’t black and hairy, it doesn’t have long legs, it ...

Within days, two scientific reports on Britain’s wildlife have made national news headlines because of their dire prognoses. The State of the UK’s Birds 2012, produced by the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, British Trust for Ornithology

It was only to be expected at this time of year, parent talk in the playground turns to frogs and toads. I haven’t seen any yet — too blistering cold, either for them to be moving or for me to out rootling in the garden — but I have just been shown

if we don’t get total extinction, we are likely to suffer biodiversity loss.Anyway, back to gardens. I had hoped to bring a live bumblebee into class. The very day before I had seen a huge buff-tailed (Bombus terrestris) queen sniffing out the daffodils

she hadn't dashed off into the depths. Today, though, when I nip out into the cold wilderness of my garden to have a little look around, I find there is a thin layer of ice on the pond.The rational part of me suspects that even though our pond is very

, but the discovery in 2011 that small tortoiseshell numbers had gone down by 68% in 10 years was pretty shocking. It has always been received wisdom that common generalist ‘garden’ species, like the small tort, were protected from some of the frightening declines