On the news here there was an interesting piece about a large cat, Beast of Bodmin style, which had been filmed in Eastern Slovakia, just 15 miles from where I live, close to the town of Bardejov. The attached photograph is a still from the video shown on the news site – http://www.noviny.sk/c/slovensko/nezname-zviera-sa-objavilo-nedaleko-bardejova-podla-odbornikov-ide-o-selmu. Experts have […]

Make sure you order a copy of Bushcraft Magazine. This Spring 2016 edition is the 10th anniversary issue and features both an article of mine (Watch out, there are boar about!) and a couple of my true forest horror stories. You can order a copy here – http://bushcraft-magazine.co.uk/. Like it says on the cover – […]

My favourite day of the week is probably Sunday because it means I can sit in my garden and just listen to birdsong without having constant background noise from chainsaws, circular saws, trimmers and other equipment as there is a no-noise policy here one day per week. We have an extremely wide range of wildlife […]

This weekend was supposed to be very wet and we almost didn’t go to the house. France and Germany have both had floods and we were expecting the same. However, despite the occasional short, hard downpour, it was scorching hot. My garden is completely overgrown but this week I discovered that the engine of my […]

Yesterday evening while doing our usual walk along the disused bush road up in the hills outside the village, we encountered a badger (Meles meles) acting very strangely. For a start, this was the first badger I’ve seen here in 18 years (I regularly catch them on game camera, usually licking it, but never encounter […]

Despite having left the camera out for over a week I had a pretty poor showing from the beasties. A fox blurred past and a badger was a pixellated mess too far away to make a decent photo of, plus 95% of the footage was again from the resident blackbird and mouse, depending on time […]

Yesterday we went for a walk just after lunch. Knowing that area well, and the time of day, I wasn’t expecting to see any large animals about as they usually prefer dawn and dusk to break the cover of the treeline. However, as we’ve had three days of constant hard rain, and this was the […]

Probably, out of all my hobbies and interests, cataloguing the creatures which live around my house ranks the highest. As a kid I used to keep a daily diary of what birds and animals I’d seen and often draw one of them. Now I have cameras and trailcams but the principle is still the same. […]

This is the weekly round up for the beginning of May. This morning the sun was shining so I hopped on my motorbike, Feisty, and set off for my village house. Once there, I donned my bush garb and traipsed across the now overgrown meadow to go check on my trailcam – I had a […]

This is the first photo from my new camera – a Canon SX412HS. It’s a photograph of the UNESCO-protected wooden church in Svidnik skanzen, Northeast Slovakia. I took the photo from my office window, approximately 1 kilometre (perhaps a little more) away. The photo required a lot of filtering due to it being quite bleached. […]