I’ve just completed two paintings that I’ve been wanting to try my hand at for a very long time – hide art. The paintings are done in acrylic on wild boar hide strung onto ash wood frames. The process of fetching the wood from the forest, carrying it home, debarking it, drying it, painting the […]

I’d completely forgotten to post this – Bushcraft Magazine‘s Summer Issue features a couple of pieces by me. There’s a how-to-make a Valaska, a Carpathian shepherd’s walking axe, and another true forest horror story. Order a copy or, better yet, subscribe for a year’s worth. It’s the best magazine on the subject out there.

After a bout of moaning, winging and complaining that I always cut her head off in photos when she models clothes for me, I decided to give my long-enduring wife her own blog post. This is a beautiful meadow we chanced upon by accident in the hills outside the village after unsuccessfully hunting for mushroom […]

Knowing that we’d be away for a week or two, I set the gamecam up in my favourite spot – one which gets no human visitation due to its inaccessibility. Once we’re back at the house for a longer period I’ll move it to higher ground and try and get some big predators. There was […]

After a stressful and very busy week with all the kids away at various times in different countries visiting capital cities on school trips, and a lengthy drive into Poland to get some diagnostics done on my Vlochka, my Discovery, we only managed to squeeze one night in at the house. Thankfully, the weather was […]

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 […]

For the last few days we’ve had nothing but rain. During early summer we get scorching hot mornings and then massive storms in the afternoons. Today while out checking my trail camera I was surrounded by Fire Salamanders (Salamandra salamandra). These are one of my favourite creatures in the Carpathian Forests. They’re very slow, docile […]

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 […]