The summer plumage of the male Snow Bunting is the most distinctive, being all black and white, with a little black bill (leading to it being described once, by a non-birder, as “a penguin the size of a sparrow”) but in the winter they are still mostly whitish… This...

This month I am going to share with you some of the joy I get from bird-watching (or birding as we tend to call it these days) on my local patch – a scrap of grassland, wetland and woods along a 1-mile stretch of Ormesby Beck in Middlesbrough – by describing a typical...

The familiar lobed leaves, which give the name to several other unrelated plants (such as Ivy-leaved Toadflax and Ivy-leaved Speedwell) are found on young plants only. More mature plants have simply oval-shaped leaves. What comes to mind when you think of Ivy? For...