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!

Yes, gardens can save the world. 😊💚 At least, our little part of it where we personally can make change. Even containers, if you have extremely limited outside space, can bring insects and birds to you through colourful, nectar-/seed-producing plants. And if you have a garden, scale up from there.

The wheel is turning, and around we go again. Into a tree canopy's withering, ivy springs up to give shelter in its place, offering the last sweet nectar before the flowerless dark, and berries to fill out the thin times. Light the fires. Broach the barrel. Life is too brief, and the winter cold.

Part II of the Wild Service adventures. I basically spend most of this short eating delicious fruit - it tastes unlike anything else I've tried, and nibbling it is the best way to extract the seeds for propagation!

Incredible creatures stomping along in a remote swampy area of America. Beautifully written encounter, and phenomenal image - worth a click of your morning. Thanks to McAulay Jaunsen, and to @oriannesociety.bsky.social for this surprising treat.

Extraordinary - thanks for sharing that! 😍

There's a fine Wild Service tree near here, and I've got some seeds cold-stratifying in the fridge as I type! I'm not sure I'd ever seen one in the wild before finding this huge stunner, thanks to a tip-off from a kind local farmer. He's keen to have more on the farm, so fingers crossed...

£8mill raised so far - one year left to raise the rest.* This is truly the project to rattle the bucket for - a real chance for positive change for UK Wildlife. *£22mill's a single night's TV fund-raising - IT CAN BE DONE. @patrickbarkham.bsky.social's great action on similar projects prove it.

This... challenges me. I only buy beautiful books, as my budget is very small - I'd kick anyone who marked them, including myself. And a dear old friend of mine gave his *200 yr old books* to an artist-friend to dismember and reuse, and I did not know how to respond to that. 😨1/

Ooh, I'm sure this is on the tip of my brain - another clue - smells like parsley. Any guesses, folks? 🥕

Planting bulbs, a yearly recitation of hope, half the wheel wished away. Cheerfulness timebombs, fuses unpredictable as luck.

Vampire Crab

Call out for scientists! 👇🚨 We are still looking for scientists who would like to work on a deep sea art project. A view artists are still looking for a teammate to create gorgous art and to celebrate the deep sea. 🦑 🐟 🐡 🐙 🦀 #SundayFishSketch

When you hear how a young person starts a bat club at school because she loves bats and has learned how important they are in nature and to us... you realise the world might just stand a chance after all. (Also, great pet choice.) #GoodGreenNews. Go Talia, go, and thanks @wcscanada.org 🦇

This is so true. She says, gawping at a pristine red admiral on the sunlit ivy. 🦋

The Rosetta stoned? #Egyptology #AncientBluesky #Archaeology 🏺 #pharmacology #medicine #trade #commodities

Vizier Pepy-Ankh wanted to have his cake and eat it! Specifically, a delicious-sounding creamy honey-sesame stuffed pancake, preserved by ingenious vacuum-inducing cookware for 4000 years since the reign of Pepi II. Discovered at Meir, Egypt, in 1913, it's officially the world's oldest cake. 1/

“Anything can happen, the tallest towers Be overturned, those in high places daunted, Those overlooked regarded.” — Seamus Heaney training.poems.com/poem/anythin...

That CCTV footage. 'C'est une boucle.' Clever, actually, breaking in in the midst of restoration works. Always respect an 'in plain sight' trick. Hope to blazes they get the missing pieces back, though they'll have been faked by now. 😢 (Swear to God it wasn't me, I left on Friday.)

I'd never seen so many whaups as I did in Orkney, a place whose beauty gets into the mind, and lingers. Stoats there are down to their final round-up, thanks to hard work and tech. Eradications *work*, people. Of course killing is unsavoury, but saving is everything in biodiversity crisis.

Here's a lovely thing! Become a Bat Conservation member and win a bat box! #conservation #wildlifegardening #gardening #ukwildlife #gardens

What a lovely post trip perk-up to be shortlisted in the @newwritersuk.bsky.social Sense of Place Competition! At 100 words, 'Derrible Caves, Sark' was the shortest short prose I've ever done. Huge congrats to the winners, and very many thanks to everyone on the competition team. 🌊

One of the loveliest bookshops, especially the library up beneath the 1600s beams, with an antique typewriter in a cubby for folks to play on and a table to sit and scrawl a few lines. Open windows looked out over the Seine. Interesting selections, inc @damianbarr.bsky.social's recent release. 😊

'like musical leaves' - perfect capture by @jamesgilbertmr.bsky.social

Spectacularly #GoodGreenNews : Suriname leading the world in protecting 90% of its forests, forging ahead with a prosperous forest- and biodiversity-centred economy, while working towards recognising ancestral lands of Indigenous and Tribal peoples. International coalition provides valuable support.

Ireland already felt like an attractive place to live and write, and with this news even more so. It's a wonderful country you live in @cauverymadhavan.bsky.social! 💚 I thought of you, @erinconnally.bsky.social also? #arts #basicincome

Everything they've ever told you about voles is true! 😀 Well, maybe not 100% true. I was so chuffed to find vole tunnels in the long grass around the base of the new(ish) hedge-planting - and a few trees had been nibbled. But owl pellets more than made up for it! #wildlifegardening

Hedge care tips for settling down a recent hedge-planting for Autumn - open up the base for light, air and moisture, but leave plenty of cover for little creatures who've hopped in to take advantage of the habitat you've created! 🐸

Experimenting with end cards and trying to usher people gently from a short to a video. It likely won't work, but Tube of You doesn't notify the lovely folk who've followed along for my ramblings of shorts. Which is frustrating. Still - apples are marvellous! Half for me, half for the birds.

'Quand une épidémie de danse terrifiait l’Europe médiévale'... ...I am entirely here for this sort of content, to be honest. 💃🕺

Very excited to say that my poem 'A crow is quite small, in the hand', about hurt wild things and the complications of trying to rescue them, was longlisted for the Canterbury Poet of the Year 2025, part of Canterbury Festival, and appears in their anthology. Thanks so much to all involved!

Chiffchaff calls, brighter days left ajar, sweet, untimely, while bronzing oakleaves begin their flutter and the mass fusillade of another mast-year's acorns blast the garage roof. Those few notes of summer an echo, a parting glass, before the singer's retreat to southern warmth or hidden silence.

Marvellous talks and analysis from the Oxford Bloomsbury Fantasy Summer School. :) Superbly interesting historical insights on mediaevalism, on Tolkien, Lewis and all those delicious 20th C Oxfordians, and now vibrant cutting edge stuff with Katherine Rundell and Samantha Shannon.

Cometh the hour when two hens will arise, of bitumen and of bone, and they shall draw lightning unto them and yet stand unamazed. People shall say among themselves, behold! Lightning putteth asunder the Doomhens as an oar through water, that which divideth yet leaveth whole. And it shall be A Sign.

Musical insults, a three-way stand-off, robins on the fencepost, gatepost, gravel, scat-singing riffs on hostility. Escalation, tumbling mid-air squabbles, the third a red flare to claim the gutter mineminemine. A dunnock swings low to tick them off - easy does it, lads, food enough for everyone.

A pipistrelle off back into the world after risky chimney shenanigans. The existence of 'a network of trained, vaccinated bat ambulance drivers and carers across Greater Manchester' is #GoodGreenNews all on its own - thanks to @battysarah.bsky.social and everyone involved. 😊🦇💚

Bear Bridges, cottonwood corridors, and Bear Smart towns - charities, indigenous communities, and town councils and residents taking the lead to connect up landscapes for bears, breaking down people's fear and grizzlies' genetic isolation. Definitely #GoodGreenNews, Montana! 🐻

Given everything that's so very wrong in the world right now, have some beautiful music combined with utterly spectacular silliness. 📯Huge congrats @meredithmoo25.bsky.social for this feat of brilliance (and endurance!)

Reflecting on Orkney, such heartstopping wilds that have been on my mind for a while, now. Can you spot the wrack's little shy friend here? 🥰🦀

Gorgeous piece from POSITIVR on why we should tolerate spiders in our homes - why can't UK media manage this? This lovely balanced piece acknowledges that some folks are scared, but lays out the many services these 'little 8-pawed weavers' provide, and why outdoors can harm some species. #inverts 🐙

This piece is a moving delight - thanks for sharing @amyjanebeer.bsky.social . We need some national action on litter. The month of Sundays litter-pick?! It'd take a month of Sundays to make a tiny dent - but if every village coordinated some action?

Now's the time to think about sowing Yellow Rattle if you've got even a tiny meadow patch in your wildlife garden - long grass is a useful thing to provide for loads of butterfly species, but the grass can get rumbunctuous. I sowed as little plugs last year, and lovely seedlings came through.

Over the broken station fence, earth scabbed with cans, sun-cracked plastic, a peacock flashes black satin, auburn velvet, organza in violet - each scale glistering fresh emergence. 1/

If Ola's inspired prescription here for reconnecting culturally with nature were followed both in the UK as well as Ireland, it wouldn't just be #GoodGreenNews, it would be great. Thanks for this thoughtful and inspiring piece, @olaln.bsky.social

Beautiful piece from @cauverymadhavan.bsky.social, who gave me such a lovely welcome to the @wcorklitfest.bsky.social after being online buddies for 5yrs. The warmth newcomers to the fest and Ireland received in Bantry is worth cherishing. We've all lots to take home from CM's heartfelt words.

Not just scraping the surface... pond restoration work retrieving vital hotspots for biodiversity in the agricultural landscape. The rewards of restoration are great, and quite speedy! Very #GoodGreenNews in action here - thanks to the Norfolk Ponds Project.

'Conservation biologists and tribal leaders have discussed the possibility of removing park fences to allow migration beyond the official borders.' Hopeful piece from Alexa Robles-Gil on how restoring Bison, and allowing movement across landscapes, revivifies damaged ecosystems. #GoodGreenNews

I've made a new list on @bookshop.org of books that explore nature / walking / the outdoors by disabled, neurodivergent and chronically ill writers - Nature Beyond Cure - aka our own narratives are messy and complex. Do share! #BookSky #DisabledWriters uk.bookshop.org/lists/nature...?

Cute little toads from 3800 years ago don't get much cuter! The Caral civilisation in Peru treasured toads for their association with the arrival of the rains - definitely feeling those vibes here in the UK after months of drought. Thanks for the timeline cleanse, @drnwillburger.bsky.social 🐸