If you didn't know, you needed to know. 😍 #AncientBluesky 🏺 #Archaeology

Here's a silly retelling of a snippet of the Odyssey that could - maybe - possibly - connect up to snowdrops. Jury's still out as other plants are available, but this one's most seasonal. 😊💚🤍 Double interesting that snowdrops have also been used in Alzheimer's and Parkinson's research.

'Refuge effects: when safety concentrates life' - fascinating response to a ranch's changing face as it fosters restoration and research, and how restraint in land-use - allowing safety throughout the ecosystem, not active 'management' - enables life complexity to build back up. #GoodGreenNews

Slightly late for Imbolc, but very much on point. Need the Lady even have been a priestess? She could well have been the water Goddess herself... We found bog iron - a lot of it - on this site at Point Rosee in Newfoundland. Magical Stuff. #Bridget #Mythology #Archaeology #AncientBluesky

After the drought, the flood. Unprecedented survival, no chance in kinder, damper years, ten months' thirst and heat hanging by the wall a Darwinian divide between them and their cosseted one-shot-wonder predecessors. Merry blue faces promising warmer times ahead.

Rained out, Chandra self-soothed, last tears undried. Clay bedrock a wall, nothinginnothingout, beneath soil become wetland in bog-dreams, if only for a while. And great tit for months crying wolf Springit'sSpringit'sSpring, finally song-truthed by blackbird's drowsy sotto voce warm-up.

A very different day.

Fighting fire with fire: drops of male mosquitos full of bacteria that cause egg sterility where resident mosquitoes don't belong - and birds affected by avian malaria do. It's ingenious, audacious, and could save desperately endangered endemic bird species in Hawai'i.

Y'know, comparison is the enemy of joy. And this stone monument makes other stone monuments feel sad about themselves. Thanks for making an ordinary Tuesday Epic, @drtobydriver.bsky.social

How lovely. You think about this often if you work with old things. To artists, archaeologists, collectors, restorers, or curators, the idea of layered meanings in things, and how those meanings are reshaped between owners/users, is endlessly fascinating. Looks like a fab exhibition.

This is marvellous fun. Spanning the era which seeded my fictional world, here's a chap whose slippery shapeshifting from royal painter to front-line revolutionary to Emperor's personal artist feels like a novel itself. David's work is rocket-fuel for the imagination.

And to think I reminisced over dizzy 18th century days of stylish immersion just this lunchtime... #researchyourepoch #amwritingfantasy

Sparrows, shredding away the catkins just-opened for grainy beakfuls of nectar and pollen, to strew a limp scything beneath the tree. Vermeil tassels snipped off half-fulfilled, the hazel's velvet rendered into haphazard dévoré of need or sweet-billed hankering. 🌳💛

This wooden mediaeval owl is ready and waiting to wrap a consoling little wing around you.

Not for the first time, @chapps.bsky.social just won the internet. Ancient Greek drinking parties where guests use animal-headed rhyta so when they drank they all had lively animal facemasks? Wild.🍷This is why I need to reconnect with my heritage. 🐴🏺 #Archaeology #AncientBluesky #Classics

'Renewables became dominant because they were cheaper and more stable than imported fossil fuels, not because of carbon targets,' says Ramon Méndez Galain, Uraguay's former energy minister, on the remarkable transformation of the country's energy future. #GoodGreenNews

Wonderful thread here full of people's inner musings on a distant but obviously not forgotten celestial body. Frankly, this is the new 'How often do you think about the Roman Empire'. Thank you for this @drspacejunk.bsky.social and all you fun commenters! 🚀

I am absolutely here for content involving undiscovered foodstuffs. Thanks very much for this @lostgoth.bsky.social and @noreenmasud.bsky.social for sirop de liege. It sounds to me like it may be cognate to Channel Islands Black Butter, which might be available around the place here?

Breathtaking capture here from @paulchamberlain.bsky.social - the stones, hunched in, enduring the snow's acupuncture prick of miniscule exfoliation, each grain a skin-cell, surface cracked away by water's frozen swell.

Every now and again, an archaeological discovery is even more exciting than the hype says. There is something simply *magical* about these objects, and if you have any love for music and the sheer evocative power of sound, you find the whole idea of the carnyx spine-tingling. #AncientBluesky

Hastening Spring, blossom coaxed out of its time. Wishing a peaceful and joyous Christmas to all who celebrate in the Eastern tradition. Thanks to @greyauk.bsky.social who taught me the lovely tradition of Barbara Twigs. 💚🌸

A different world entirely. #Egyptology

These long nights with very hard frosts are the times when Wrens are triggered to nest communally. Take care not to disturb sheds or outbuildings as night time approaches, if you have Wrens in the garden. They only approach in the deepest gloaming & can be hard to spot. @lizaadamczewski.bsky.social

Far too cold to be out in the garden today, with a peppering of snow sticking around on the frozen puddles. Off out for a walk then, and there's plenty of interest in the hedgerows! Lots of Robin's Pincushions in the dog-rose, both wasp and rose kept busy last summer!

New Year's eve, sky clear and frost-swept, the thin tremulous cry of a barn owl across the sunset, its loose dark silhouette skimming the ombre of peach-gold into dusk. Closing bracket to January 3rd, a barn owl backlit gold in its talons-out pounce; a two-owl year, just. 🤍

Haunting festive presence.

Lovely thread here on one of the most sumptuous pieces of art ever to grace a Christmas card. Thanks to @chapps.bsky.social and everyone who joined in the conversation! 💙👼🦌

The sheer seasonal joy of a little doggo and her very own advent calendar... 😍 Thank you @greyauk.bsky.social and your Mum. 💚

Sets the bar that whole chunk higher for unboxing videos... 🎅#archaeology #ancientBluesky 🏺 #Santa #Christmas

Gorgeous Christmassy shenanigans from @elizacarthy.bsky.social and @jonboden.bsky.social at St Dunstan's, Cranbrook for last night of The Wassail Tour. Made my Yule. 😊🎄Had to rush off - taxi going frantic: 'Sorry I'm late, there was this song about a hippopotamus...' 😀🦛 Merry Christmas, guys! ❤️

This will be brilliant! Wendy is a fabulous lecturer who makes archaeology accessible, exciting, and often hilarious - and she's right, this'd make a great Xmas gift for the archaeophile in your fam - and it's helping fight the good fight at the same time. #AncientBluesky #Archaeology 🏺 #History

If, like me, you grow a lot of lovely insecty plants in pots and containers, here are five little jobs for this time of year which will get things through the winter months so they're raring to go in the Springtime. And yes, I'm still banging the crocus drum! 💜

And what in the world am I to wish from fifteen magpies, strafing the bluster with expectant drumrolls, chalk and coal chequering the streaked overcast, each a-seesaw on an oak's fingertips to catch the sun's last copper... And away, in a shrapnel of curses, convocation disbanded.

Top marks to National Gallery shop for its yummy display in 1600sish (?) still life. Why would one *not* want candles looking like cheese, bread and fruit? Or sparkly glass vegetable baubles, pretty, if, at the core, decidedly odd? I coveted the mediaeval glassware. And the #crustmas brooches! 🦀

It's finally getting chilly out - time to frost-protect your dahlias if you grow those flamboyant lovelies for your bumbles, bees, and hoverflies. Either overwinter in shelter or lift and take into protective custody! Link below. youtube.com/shorts/5T4Er...

Wonderful news for a quietly brilliant little bird - thanks so much to everyone involved. #GoodGreenNews

This list of people's favourite natural things to see is a treat. 😊💚

Look at this glorious idea! For the pyromaniacs and creatures of hygge among us, a whole candle a day is much more sensible dose of candlelight! Thank you @loreandordure.com for sharing this wonderment! 😍🕯️

Genuinely the best news I've had for months.

Red in tooth and claw...

Gorgeous seasonal going on in Nicola's part of the world - was just having wreathy thoughts myself... Yours is wild and wonderful @nicolawriting.bsky.social 🎄Glad you're getting back on your feet! 💚

Corky perfection. Looks like a little clover-leaf. This is the blossom-end, but corky, warty protuberances that a pumpkin sometimes grows result from excess sugars developing genetically or during particularly warm weather. Thanks for this, @lynda-art-write.bsky.social, and Happy Thanksgiving, all.

Even in the bleakest times, this little herald of the returning sun lights up the earth - Crocus are good for a sunny windowbox, doorstep-pot, or balcony, if you're short of space. Possibly also money off on some websites now, too! Here's my take on crocus - a very important plant for early bumbles!

Leeds Castle's Neverland Christmas was still under construction when I visited last week - and building it looked like the best fun ever. 😀 Much piratical cheerfulness was evident, including sea-creatures galore. ⚓🦀🦜

Most people don't realise that this part of possibly the largest colossus Ancient Egypt ever created is for storing your eraser to stop it getting dusty. #Egyptology

Me, championing Chequertrees again, in the last little part of this series - unless, fingers crossed, the seeds germinate and I have reason to make a celebratory video in the Spring! 🌱 A bit more history here on the tree's two names and its use in making BEER! 🍻

Welcome to the Iron Age. Slippery when wet.

Despite what the silly screengrab says this is about Witch Hazel, Hamamelis. Perhaps it's actually a Freudian slip, as the UK native Hazel is MUCH better for UK wildlife, and much as Witch hazels are very pretty, they have nothing to do with witches!

Very unexpected little visitor to the ivy on Saturday morning - and seemed much larger than usual! The photobombing greenbottle is trying on butterfly-wings. A third generation this late in the year is apparently unusual, but could be a sign of our changing times.

The extraordinary benefits to which human ingenuity and inquiry can be put - probiotic treatment boosts bat survival from white-nose syndrome, a catastrophic fungal infection. Just as pro-biotics balance your tum, so they balance a bat's chance at life. Thanks for this incredible work, WCS!