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A plaintive mewling took me to the end of the garden a couple of days ago. At first I thought a cat had caught a bird or had cornered a fledgling. As I got closer I realised it was coming from a tree and wondered if some strange seagull was lost

It's finally arrived - that November damp chill enough to make me nag the girls into wearing a proper coat as they set off to the bus-stop for school. They're having none of it though. As I wander round the garden, examining the scorched earth from

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

The orb webs of the garden spider, Araneus diadematus are much in evidence as the nights get cooler, especially in the morning when their dew- or rain-covered tracery is revealed all over the bushes.It's fascinating to watch them being created first

I used to see foxes all the time. Whenever I looked out of the window there was almost certainly one sniffing about in the garden or strolling nonchalantly down the street. Winter nights were alive with the unearthly yelps and screams of the males

plumipes is not a bumblebee (although it's about the same size), and has no commonly used English name, which is a shame because it's a characteristic and widespread garden insect. I've always described it as the 'feather-footed bee' (the Latin - plumipes

There's a spider the size of a gardening glove in my compost bin. It obviously gets a good living in there, feeding on the flies, woodlice, beetles and earwigs, the remains of which can be vaguely guessed in its untidy sheet of a web. I wouldn

At last, a butterfly in my garden. Now I know from comments on previous blogs that others have already seen lots this year. There's a tendency to brag about them, I think. But my garden was empty of butterflies until Saturday. Then, like buses

Snow is not the best weather for finding insects, so I was not surprised, last week, when my brief wander up the garden found nothing. It didn’t help that I was under sustained attack from snowballing children at the time. But as my fellow bloggers

as they flick their way along the fence. Then there is the fox again.Our garden, it seems, is as much a thoroughfare as ever. I've a house full of coughing and wheezing children at the moment, so none of us has gone out to disturb the snow. But there are tracks