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, Cheshire in the early 1960s, and was thought to have come back with some large pine cones picked up in the Portugal countryside and brought home as souvenirs. This was a false start, but it got a proper foothold in 1995, and is now everywhere.The southern

adaptation to the disappearance of greenery in autumn and the fact that these bugs sun themselves on brown tree trunks to warm up when they re-emerge in spring.I can't resist picking up these bumbling creatures, they're lovely. Their clockwork gait is almost

.Unfortunately, the foxes that frequented the many out-of-the-way wildlife havens along the tracks could not read the danger signs and it was not uncommon to come across the remains of one picked clean beside the rails. At one time we had a good half dozen fox skulls around

's alarm was a female. These lack the huge antler jaws of the male but still are impressive beasts. And the small jaws are just as likely to give a nip if she's picked up less than cautiously. I've heard an anecdotal report that female stag beetles are more

of picking up my first click beetle, many years ago. It twitched and clicked between my finger and thumb and I felt I must have found something truly remarkable. I dashed off, whooping and clutching my prize, to show mum and dad.There was no-one to show my

the cats have left in the back garden. Could be rich pickings.

into trouble. Especially as last weekend, I did a bit of, well, tidying in the garden. It was limited, however, to clipping a few stray rose branches that had suddenly shot out at eye height. And I picked up a few windfall apples to see which ones I could

and The Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust makes mixed reading. Most of the national media have concentrated on losses and falls to make their articles ‘newsworthy’. Pick your own statistic: 22 million birds lost since the 1960s; non-native birds now make up 20 per cent

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