Title photo: Green Woodpecker I know the year’s not over yet but I figured I’d update my blog with some of the wildlife highlights from this year. This is by no means all the animals or birds I encountered, or even photographed/filmed, but the ones presented are some of the more memorable. Probably the most […]

A cottage in one of the wildest and most beautiful areas of Europe during a long, freezing cold Winter. Life here is both a daily challenge and a great source of joy. I’m often asked why I live where I do, and in this short video I try to explain my reasoning. Traditional rural life […]

I don’t know where the last 5 months went, since the start of the pandemic and quarantine, but the time has flown by. This Summer we had 3 continuous months of hard unrelenting rain which caused huge mould problems in the house. We occasionally had a warm couple of days, around 30 C, but nothing […]

Things had been going too smoothly this Summer but that ended on Sunday when I fell backwards on to a rock pile and broke my 6th rib. That’s the third rib I’ve broken in four years and it really sucks. I didn’t go to the hospital until Wednesday, hoping it was just a bruised lung […]

This year’s big work about the house was to build a woodshed as last winter saw us woefully unprepared. We had the wood but because there was nowhere to cut, chop and stack it, my sons and I had had to go out in literal blizzards to chainsaw metre-long logs, then chop them on an […]

On an extremely spontaneous impulse we decided to stay the weekend at the house for the first time since leaving it on New Year’s Day. It’s been a long, harsh winter this year and having a couple of days of heat and blue sky was too irresistible. Unfortunately, the interior of the house is still […]

A few weeks back I got really sick of hearing people tell me that, because of global warming, we’d have a warm winter this year. The start of November was incredibly warm – I was doing our evening walks wearing a t-shirt. However, you could smell the oncoming cold in the air, and then it […]

Most of the following will undoubtedly be in the wrong order. This Autumn has been hectic to say the least and saw a big upheaval in our family when my eldest boy, Brano, went to Uni. I haven’t kept up with my blog because things keep changing daily – as did Autumn itself, transforming from […]

It’s  a very long way to Peljesac, Croatia, and it’s an even longer way back… This summer holiday we rented a place on the sea in a remote area of the southern Peljesac peninsula (6kms to the nearest basic shop – that’s remote). As usual we drove south through Slovakia, then went from the East […]

This evening I’m a happy man as I finally managed to photograph the annoyingly elusive black woodpecker (Dryocopus martius). These birds, along with the golden oriole I photographed earlier this year, have been tauting me for decades. Similarly, neither species of bird seems to sit still long enough  to be photographed. They’re crap photos I […]