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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

much rather take easy pickings.It is an oft-forgotten rule, but the answer to the question 'what do carnivores eat?' is not 'meat' or 'other animal', but 'whatever they can get'. But this does not mean they are constantly on the ferocious hunt for prey

Although autumn hangs heavier in the air with each day, it only takes a brief break in the clouds to bring shy wildlife back out into the open. So it was on Friday last week when I headed for the horticultural delights of North Woolwich. Here

into doggerel when all thought of sorrow or joy, girl or boy was erased from my mind. It purposefully stepped forward, picked up a dead mouse that was lying in the grass and flew off.We've had mice in the compost bins ever since we started putting kitchen waste

Monday morning and a jay visited the kitchen window. I always think these are incredibly handsome birds and the small blue wing feathers still give me a childish thrill when I find one dropped. I can't resist picking it up to stick in my hat

by the snow.I regularly find queen wasps curled up, with their wings folded and tucked down underneath their bodies. With metabolism turned down to barely tick-over, they are immobile and can be closely examined (but not picked up) without risk of startling

hibernation now are mostly green, but the summer form has vague reddish brown patches across its back. It too has a slight smell of mouldy almonds, especially if picked up; these are the bitter-tasting cyanide compounds used by shieldbugs to deter predators

resist picking one up if I see it. They make the perfect adornment to my hat.

to glide effortlessly along. But if you pick them up they tie themselves in knots. Literally. They curl into a rough ball, looping their curls together into a living clove hitch.Any gardener should always be pleased to find centipedes. Since

today, nearly 150 years later."I have known one make its way habitually through a zinc pipe into a green-house, and do much service there by picking aphides from the slender stalks of herbaceous plants, which bent into the form of an arch under even its