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of year.The hedge outside is covered with birds in all shapes and sizes, munching away at the many and left-overs I've put out for them. I've left them little heaps of Christmas pudding, crumbled up biscuits and I've filled up one of the peanut feeders

and was rewarded with the sight of Ledra aurita, a large and curiously shaped plant-hopper I'd never seen before. When I say large, I mean 15-18 mm long, so you can imagine how small most of the others are. It is immediately identified by the two large, broad, flat

At 11 o'clock in the morning, the bowl of Bob-the-Builder pasta shapes was either a late second breakfast, or an early first lunch - whatever, it was interrupted by the announcement from nearly-three-year-old: "Look, there's a magpie". Sure enough

in daylight until nearly 10pm, I now find that it is dark outside whilst I sit at the laptop and do a bit of writing. Now, as I sit with the French windows wide open, it really is very dark out there, but every now and then I catch a glimpse of a pale shape

, and could not make out the distinctive shape of this pretty bird. Of course they are renowned for playing hide-and-seek with observers, hopping round to the other side of the trunk if they see they are being watched. Some years ago I was able to see one very

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

blocked.For the first 18 years living here there was never a rat in sight, but within a few months of setting the chickens up in their new home, the rats arrived. As chickens become popular in residential areas I wonder if anyone else is having the same

in Britain. Although there are about 250 species of hoverfly in the UK, and roughly 100 of them are black and yellow wasp mimics, this one is immediately recognizable by its narrow parallel-sided body shape and the fact that some abdominal segments have two

(former Yugoslavia), in the late 1970s, but was not identified until 1986. It has been spreading through Europe until it arrived here in 2002. No one knows quite where it came from, though there are several members of the genus in North America. There is a

a special thick mucus, much tougher and stickier than their usual soft slime and this forms a dangling rope down which they slide. Usually, after an abseil of about 45cm (18in) in mid air, they start to spin in a slow balletic pirouette. All