True Irish curlews are in serious trouble and may face imminent extinction, writes Dick Warner

THROUGH the late summer and autumn a cock pheasant has been feeding in the field outside my study. He’s a big bird with a long tail and fairly elderly, writes Dick Warner.

I’VE just come back from my first visit to Malta. I found it to be a fascinating and charming country but I was puzzled by the lack of birds. 

My little wood is pretty full now. In fact, there are parts of it where I should probably do a bit of thinning. Some of the most interesting and bio-diverse parts of a woodland are actually the spots where there are no trees. The woodland glade has an ecology of its own.

Mobbing is an interesting piece of behaviour and it’s not confined to birds, writes Dick Warner

BIRD migration is an extraordinary thing, in fact, in some cases, it verges on the unbelievable. Every autumn Aleutian bar-tailed godwits fly non-stop for nine days from Alaska to New Zealand, a distance of more than 11,000km.

SOME people find autumn a bit depressing because it signals that summer is over and winter isn’t too far away, writes Dick Warner. 

When it comes to choosing plants to create a garden that’s hospitable for wildlife, you are generally advised to chose native species rather than immigrant ones. I have given this advice myself many times in talks and articles.