I am leading a course next year on behalf of Kent Wildlife Trust 'An introduction to Dragonflies and Damselflies'. See below for further details. @britishdragonflies.bsky.social www.kentwildlifetrust.org.uk/events/intro...

And the fruits! Rosehip, Spindle, Privet, Hawthorn and Bittersweet #NotTheWinter10 #WildflowerHour

Wild carrot from yesterday's Norfolk Flora group meeting @bsbibotany.bsky.social #wildflowerhour

#Wildflowerhour Hedge Woundwort, Stachys sylvatica in a village hedgerow near Monmouth.

I was super pleased to find the Lesser Calamint, Clinopodium nepata, still in flower at Lesnes Abbey (LB Bexley) on Tuesday. I thought I had missed it for this year. It has a delicious minty aroma. #WildflowerHour

Time for a #WildflowerID appeal - this was growing at the Stubb Mill bird watching platform at Norfolk Wildlife Trust Hickling Broad reserve. I often struggle to identify plants with tiny flowers as it's harder to work out what family they are, so what page of the book to look at. #WildflowerHour

Congrats to @bsbibotany.bsky.social on launching their new website! Huge thanks to everyone who put in the hard work behind the scenes. The site’s now clearer, easier to use and full of great botanical info. If you’ve not yet seen it, go check it out! #botany #wildflowers #plantscience #nature

A fruit not a flower, but we can bend the rules, can't we? Spindle with its orange berries just emerging from the pink fruiting bodies at RSPB Strumpshaw Fen on Tuesday afternoon. #WildflowerHour

Another one from my front yard on Tuesday. Common Ragwort looking a lot better than the examples I saw in Norfolk after the storm had had a go at them. #WildflowerHour

On Tuesday before I set off for Norfolk I checked on the Fox and Cubs that grows in the cracks in my front yard. Yup, still flowering happily. #WildflowerHour

Horrible weather in Norfolk this week so not much for #WildflowerHour - Gorse was reliable though. This one was at RSPB Minsmere on Thursday after the big storm the evening before.

In Monrovia, California, protesters are purchasing 17¢ ICE scrapers from Home Depot and immediately returning them to create long lines and slow down the entire store. Their aim is to disrupt sales and convey a message opposing ICE raids occurring in their neighborhood.

Evergreen tweet!

Naomi shattered our minds by holding a party last night and then halfway through announcing that they'd eloped and we were in fact attending a wedding reception. Immense.

I think this sums up Blue Labour to a tee: someone experiences, or shares a human tragedy, and you feel sad for them, but equally it doesn’t give them license to tear up 600 years of information about what drives prosperity and replace it with saying the word “relational” a lot.

I sincerely have developed the take that everyone in politics or adjacent has to work hospitality/customer service for one month every 2 years so they stop writing complete nonsense about what work actually is like

Red Kite over the garden this afternoon. Sawston, Cambs.

Scrapping the two-child limit *is* welfare reform. Defining ‘reform’ solely as ‘cut’ is one reason why it’s proved so difficult

Trump is calling Zelenskyy ungrateful and arrrrggghhhhh*^%#}*%#{{##%€$¥€>~?

It remains insane to me that DOGE was treated at the time as an impressive shock and awe accomplishment - “you can’t deny he’s getting stuff done!” - and then instantly memory holed by the press once if became clear it was a total failure by every possible standard including Musk’s own

Rubio: The peace plan was developed with UKR input. Which was? Rubio: They shouted “FFS” and flipped the table.

In honour of its proponents, I suggest that the Dmitriev-Witkoff proposal should henceforth be called the Dim-Wit Plan

To clarify: I forwarded this because I agree with Dmitry's point about how the people grifting from the MAGA brigade are hurting their own countries. I'm told the "heat map" in the initial post is fake. Ironically enough.

I guess the challenge here is that while this might be personally lucrative for MAGASuperFan1488 from Uganda (which fine I guess, go get that bread Grifter King), the West descending into technofascism is not going to be good for ANYONE. Those deaths because of USAID cuts weren't in Kansas.

The irony of these people complaining about the invented dangers of immigrants and then welcoming brain pollution from overseas hustlers.

Friday: "Sign this by Thanksgiving or it's all over for you." Saturday: "This is nothing to do with us, some other boys wrote it." Sunday: "By 'some other boys wrote it', of course I meant some other boys wrote the denial that we wrote it. Here's my lunch money."

You see this also with the “we have to reduce immigration or racism will get worse”. The average person who thinks immigration is too high does not think that makes gutter racism ok and does not agree with, e.g. “let’s do a Partition scale ethnic cleansing in the UK”.

"Unfortunately, due to a terrible miscalculation of scale, the entire 28-point peace plan was eaten by a small dog."

There are undiscovered hunter gatherer tribes deep in the Amazon rainforest with a clearer and more consistent foreign policy position on the Ukraine war than the current US administration.

On one side of my family we have zero knowledge of our lineage before my grandpa. There was just nobody left to ask. He wasn’t even sure if his last name was real or made up. And there’s a story like this in almost every Ukrainian household. Today is Holodomor Remembrance Day

Magical lantern installations today at Winterfest in #Swindon town centre

With colder temperatures here now, I expect my season is over. The Dainty Damselfly had another pleasing season and continues to do well at a few sites. A few to look back on in warmer weather. @britishdragonflies.bsky.social #Teamdragonfly #UKwildlife

Are you interested in wildlife and nature? Wealden District Council are running a Nature Photography Competition which all ages can get involved in. To enter and find out more please visit: buff.ly/9SBxVX0

On Holodomor Remembrance Day, Ukrainians light a candle at 4 pm and place it on the windowsill to honor the millions who died in the 1932-1933 famine. 🕯️4 pm in Ukraine

Not sure that this short form of cricket will catch on.

that's it have a lovely weekend do not, i repeat DO NOT read anything else about Robert Kennedy Jr today. I warned you

i did not have electropope on my bingo card, ngl

had plans for the evening but guess I'm just going to sit here and repost every single thing I see about the fucking insane Trump/Mamdani meeting

"Sir Keir told the BBC: 'Every minute that is spent talking about anything other than cost-of-living is a wasted minute in my book.'" OK, so why does his government keep banging on about immigration? www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Is this the first illustration of mansplaining?

If there is ever a datapoint for how no one ever learns anything ever it is in how after Trump's strategic fuck ups with the US-Russia meetings in Riyadh and Anchorage you still see people wasting 1000s of Substack wordcount on another American strategic brainfart

Sadly, Kimmel did not say "quiet, Piggy" to Trump's actual face. I really hope someone does, and soon.

This Is Just To Say I would like the passwords that are in your memory and which you were probably saving for someone else

Hysteria about a Trump Ukraine-Russia peace deal that is not going to happen also means no attention to signs of a Trump US-Venezuela war that looks increasingly likely to happen

From Private Eye

Things I did today instead of doomscrolling 1. Ranked the top 5 things from papa's 2. Carefully washed my grandad's celery jar and tomato bowl 3. Made yet more stars 4. Started cutting strips for paper chains from old maps 5. Found 3 road atlases to turn into trees or angels

this week's newsletter is titled "aren't you tired of feeling insane all the time?" and I think it speaks for itself it is also free to read youngvulgarian.substack.com/p/arent-you-...

I’m sorry I know we’re all autistic and we can take stuff literally but someone just tried to doxx one of the characters from our satirical website and it’s finished me off