Yesterday, my friend Rusty met me in Bardejov, East Slovakia to take me hill walking. I left my car and got into his Toyota Hilux Kingcab, then we headed off on the Stara Lubovna road until turning off onto progressively smaller and worse condition roads until ending up in the incredibly middle-of-nowhere, end-of-the-road village of Livovská […]

It’s been quite a while since I last updated my blog, since well before Christmas in fact. It’s been a strange period with several ups and downs and much reflection. We stayed at the house in Eastern Slovakia over the Christmas and New Year period, which was both hard and amazing at the same time. […]

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 […]

If it walks, crawls, flies or slithers then chances are I’ve got one somewhere on my property. The old log cabin (budka) at the end of my garden is home to quite a few bats. This one is roosting from one of the multiple wasp nests we have about the place. There’s an immense wasp […]

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 […]

Last Saturday, 28th of April, my motorcycle club – Tilters Svidnik – headed out to Andy Warhol’s hometown, Medzilaborce, to join hundreds of other riders for the annual blessing at the start of the riding season. Close to the Ukraine border in the small Slovak village of Krasny Brod, bikers and motorcyclists from all over […]

Spring is on the horizon so today we went to the house to check the water situation. We switched off the mains supply over a month ago, before the temperature plummeted to minus 20, and we left the taps open. Unfortunately, the tap in the bath was dripping, although we have no idea why. Fast […]

Today I went to check on the house and got to drive through some pretty thick snow. Vlochka, my Discovery, really has her use sometimes. On the way home I spotted a Ural owl just sitting on a branch about twenty feet from the road. For once, the sky was vaguely blue and the bright […]

This issue features one of my true horror stories from the forest – White Out – plus my photo of wolf tracks in the snow is on the cover. Order yourself a copy or sign up for a subscription here – The Bushcraft Magazine. Bushcraft Magazine is suited for both beginners and experts and covers […]