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proportions. In fact, London’s gulls are still something of a novelty, despite the maritime nature of the tidal Thames.I once had a relationship-threatening close encounter with a herring gull in St James’s Park, but I gloss over that here. It is the black

as the harlequin, and is orange with white spots. It has orange legs and its crocodile-like larva is yellow with black spots. It was once considered an indicator of ancient woodland, but is now expanding its range into habitats like London parks, where I found mine

I saw a lot of lizards on my trip around South America. There were brown lizards, green lizards, bright blue ones, and some that blend in perfectly with the red and black volcanic environment they inhabit.I was lucky enough to see a pair of lizards

the rusty-red females. And there were several specimens of the distinctive large black and ashy white Andrena cineraria.Lots of the bumblebee-like Anthophora plumipes have been darting about. The all-black females are often pursued by a posse of black

It’s all looking rather still and damp in the garden now. Autumn, it seems, has come at last. Over the Guy Fawkes weekend, there were reports on iSpot and Flickr of red admirals and hoverflies visiting the sun-lit ivy, but, in my garden at least

-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

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

The snow was great fun, but it made wildlife watching in my garden a bit pointless. I am rather biased on this, because as far as I'm concerned, wildlife really means insects. OK, there are a few birds and the odd squirrel out there

On holiday in northern France last week I was struck by the similarities in the landscape, but very subtle differences in the wildlife.With its gently rolling hills, hedges, grazing meadows, small woods, narrow lanes and winding streams, I could

down into. We've only been here a couple of hours when someone spots a huge black beetle crawling up the wall--the bloody nose beetle Timarcha tenebricosa, so called for the reflex bleeding of bitter red fluid from it's mouth if picked up. A great