Continuing our 'Birdwatching Wednesday' theme, the other night I came across a documentary on Twitchers on BBC4. I watched it for as long as I could endure, which was about a quarter of an hour. Dear me, what is wrong with these people? They seem to have no intrinsic interest in ... Read More...
Nature
Ian Vince writes the regular Strange Days column in The Daily Telegraph and is the author of 'The Lie of the Land' - a great new book that attempts to uncover and demystify the UK's fascinating geology (he wrote a guest post for The Dabbler on the subject here.) He is also ... Read More...
Taken from Martin Osborne's series Mute:The silence of dogs in cars, currently on show at theprintspace, 74 Kingsland Road, London E2 8DL until 9th November. ... Read More...
Medieval illuminated manuscripts sometimes feature animals capering irreverently around the margins, such as the ones above and below. I discovered whilst reading Peter Ackroyd's fascinating Albion: The Origins of the English Imagination that these doodles are quite excellently called 'babooneries'. I also learnt that, at least according to Nikolaus Pevsner, ... Read More...
Ian Vince's 'The Lie of the Land' is a great new book that attempts to uncover and demystify some of the fascinating geology that lies beneath our feet here in the UK. Ian writes the regular Strange Days column in The Daily Telegraph, which focuses on curious and undiscovered aspects ... Read More...
Today's Dabbler Country is a guest post by Guardian writer Patrick Barkham, whose book The Butterfly Isles - A Summer in Search of Our Emperors and Admirals is published by Granta this month. For those of us who join the likes of Vladimir Nabokov, John Fowles and the famous clown Joseph ... Read More...
I've been reading Oliver Rackham's The History of the Countryside, a book full of ideas, observations and interesting facts. It's a great myth-buster and is permeated by a sceptical curiosity that's never shy of actually visiting a patch of land if that's what's required to rescue us from what is described ... Read More...
The other night at home, there was a dark moth fluttering around the ceiling light. Idly wondering what it might be, I waited for it to settle - which it eventually did, in a most unmothlike manner. It was a butterfly, a Speckled Wood - and having one of those in ... Read More...
A Dabbler Country double bill today. We are delighted to present a post from Martin Wainwright. Martin has written numerous invaluable books about the countryside, is the northern editor of The Guardian and is a prolific blogger on the subject of moths... As an increasingly ancient journalist, I’ve lived through many stories ... Read More...
Yesterday, in Holland Park, I saw a boy in a tree. He was sitting contentedly at the top of a decent-sized ornamental maple, while a young woman - too young to be his mother - waited below with no sign of anxiety or concern. In due course the boy clambered ... Read More...
