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. Like long-tailed tits, goldcrests eat insects and spiders, but specialise in tiny morsels such as moth eggs. Their beaks are designed to pick out insects from between pine needles. In really cold winters they will occasionally come to garden feeders, so keep

. Hot and humid is best, apparently.In any one area, ants from thousands of nests will take to the skies at once, forming large, mating swarms. It's exciting, not least for insect-eating birds, which have rich pickings for a day or two. Of the bird

. On warm, summer evenings we take our bat detector and a bag of chips to the canal and sit on a bench, waiting for pipistrelles and Daubenton's to emerge from their roosts. We've also been on guided bat walks and taken part in surveys, picking up

20 seconds worrying what the neighbours would think, and then relaxed, happy with our new arrival.My bumblebees (RIP) were rescued from friends who were landscaping their garden; some of my frogs were rescued from a kitchen drain and the rest I picked

’t allowed to pick it up.Some years later, when diving in Fiji, a sea snake slithered past me, just after I had got back in the boat. Two minutes earlier and I would have been able to swim with it, or at least follow it for a while, before it vanished

certainly in trouble and will need help. Pick the hedgehog up using an old towel or a pair of thick gardening gloves. Keep it warm by placing it on a hot water bottle wrapped in a towel, in a high-sided box lined with newspaper, and then place another towel

the bumblebee nest and hangs around outside for a few days to pick up its scent. Once she has done this, she enters the nest undetected to lay her eggs. These hatch into caterpillars, which start off by eating the nest debris before moving to the wax pots

morning when I find it skulking around the plant pots.I like cats, despite the havoc they wreak on wildlife. I don’t blame them for their murderous tendencies, and – touch wood – I’ve never experienced any using my garden as a litter tray. But I do worry

of hedgehogs, fox attacks are relatively new. It’s thought that foxes don’t tend to eat hogs, but instead pick them up in their mouths and puncture their skin with their teeth. The initial attack doesn’t kill the hogs, but (please don’t read on if you’re eating