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After writing an article on how and why to keep a garden wildlife diary for BBC Gardener's World Magazine, I've been invited to go electronic and turn it into a blog. My handwriting is atrocious so maybe this will be a good way of keeping the diary

There's a spider the size of a gardening glove in my compost bin. It obviously gets a good living in there, feeding on the flies, woodlice, beetles and earwigs, the remains of which can be vaguely guessed in its untidy sheet of a web. I wouldn

of ants scaled this giant, slicing through branches with their machines.I was quite upset but, ever the optimist, I used the opportunity to collect some local, native logs to make a nice wildlife habitat in my mum’s garden. I was sure she wouldn’t mind

to the Horniman Museum later this week, where they'll use them in some of the hands-on displays and as education duplicates for visiting school children. As I'm taking a quick peek at each one under the microscope I come across a tiny brown domed beetle; at just

For anyone who thought the cold winter might have been a bit harsh for wildlife, I hope the recent heatwave has been an eye-opener. I’ve certainly never seen so much insect life in April before. The garden has been awash with orange-tips, holly

; slugs I thought, but maybe not.Wireworms are the tough cylindrical orange-brown larvae of click beetles. The agricultural ones, several Agriotes species, live in the soil layer feeding on roots and tubers, which of course, brings them into conflict

scatologist perhaps? Looking for dung beetles is an oddly satisfying occupation, and I’ve spent many a happy hour working my way round a grazing meadow dissecting cow pats to see what goes on in this hidden world of natural by-product recycling.Horse dung

pupating and emerging as an adult. They are usually species of fly or moth, but some are types of beetle or sawfly. There are flies that tunnel through spinach and beetroot, moths that fashion phallic-shaped 'cases' from leaves of apples, beetles that leave

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

A recent comment to a blog entry got me thinking about vine weevils. I haven't seen many in my garden for a few years. I wonder if this is the result of my zero-tolerance approach. Along with lily beetles, this is about the only creature I