I’ve been a bit quiet of late. It’s because I’ve been a bit busy. While I’m always keeping my options open and looking for new and exciting opportunities to deploy, well, let’s face it, a relatively niche set of skills to the world at large. Over the last couple of years, things have gone nuts.
I’ve returned to my roots of late and am pursuing life as a field ecologist again. It’s where I started, and, while I will always consider broadcast work, it hasn’t been very forthcoming of late. That
said, I’m probably the happiest I’ve been for a long while.
Living in the beautiful and vast Cairngorm National Park, here in the highlands of Scotland, I’ve learned that the summer season gets underway suddenly. It’s almost like a flick of a switch, and we go from winter to summer! It’s a short season, too – life cycles spin faster than I’ve been used to. Flowering seasons and insect emergence are like fireworks: they burn bright and fast. I spend my time running to catch up.
The long, dark, cold winter evenings are when I light the fire, pour a dram and start to unfold my thoughts and reflections. Ta da!
This is what I’m doing right now. So what exactly am I doing? Well, I’m constantly peppering my diary with guiding work. I love to share amazing places with like-minded folk. If this is you and you’ve not visited the relevant pages on this website, click here to see the sorts of trips I’ll be leading in the near future. Additionally, I’m writing quite a bit. A regular column for BBC Wildlife, now called ‘Hidden Worlds’, features in every edition. See links to some online versions here.
I have also just completed a second revised edition of the RSPB’s Nature Trackers Handbook. With lots of tweaks, this is a ‘gateway’ book to help readers (from budding ecological Sherlocks and Marples of any age) uncover and interpret the tracks and signs of our British and Northern European species, from insects to mammals. My favourite additions to this are the brilliant footprint and track illustrations by my friend and tracking guru David Wege.
There are a couple of brand-new books in the making, too. For Princeton University Press’ Wild Guides’. This has been in the pipeline for a long time and is a field guide to ponds and pond life (that’s the concept title). It will be a field guide with a twist. If you are fascinated by ponds and the aquatic life they hold, then I really hope you’ll like and buy this book. It’s about to enter the design stage, so we’re still a little off on completion. But watch this space.
I am also writing another book for the same publisher, this one is all about the night… I shan’t give too much more away about this right now. You’ll have to wait.
The rest of my time has been taken up working as a field ecologist. I have had some fantastic times carrying out aquatic invertebrate surveys (as part of the Cairngorm National Parks Beaver project), surveying for the endangered and surprisingly interesting fresh water pearl mussel, some upland breeding bird surveys (also butterflies and dragonflies) and by far the biggest and most involved project has been leading on a ‘wood ant and narrow-headed ant captive breeding trial’ – more about this in a separate blog.
