David Bradley's Nature Matters

As you get older, you might notice that it’s harder to have a decent conversation in a noisy room, especially if there’s background music playing. This might be despite not having any specific hearing problems, according to RNID online checks or other tests. So, it was interesting to see a tip on Threads from a sound guy who mentioned that he always dips the EQ at 600-2000 Hz when he’s playing background music at an event where people are chatting. He reckons this allows people to converse…

I’ve been writing about science since the late 1980s. That’s long before the public got on to the World Wide Web, before smartphones and when Wi-Fi was still sci-fi, Before Google, Facebook, TwitteX, and Heaven forbid, TikTok and Snapchat. Before the Human Genome Project was even launched, before Dolly the sheep was cloned, and before CRISPR gene-editing first went snipping. Before the Hubble Space Telescope was launched, before we discovered a single exoplanet, before the Higgs boson was…

A desire path is an unofficial route, or trail, worn into the ground by the repeated passage of people or animals. In the urban landscape, a desire path will be worn where a carefully planned, but perhaps convoluted, footpath takes the long way round, and people simply cut that aesthetic route short. Desire paths can occur even where no path exists at all and that is usually true with the paths wild animals create in their landscape. The obvious rhetorical question is why follow that winding…

I think most of us in the world of nature observation have tales to tell of dodgy identifications from the various apps. The Merlin is great if you sort of know what you’re listening to, but it can throw you off course and suggest birds that would be pretty much impossible. Sometimes it will claim to have heard such-and-such a species, an Eider Duck, say, far inland, when you can definitely tell that the sound it’s picking up was actually some farm machinery. And, it’s notorious at…

It’s 7th October, it’s persisting down…last night’s mothing session wasn’t too bad, but things are gradually tailing off, even the Lunar Underwings seem to have had their day this year with just one specimen last night after a peak of more than a dozen a few nights ago. There will undoubtedly be a few more specimens braving the cooler nights and perhaps one or two more New For Garden (NFG) moths. However, the main thing to report from 2026 is a massive bounce back in specimen numbers and…

I had a fragment of a song I started to write recorded on my phone quite some time ago. I happened upon it by chance this week and expanded the lyrics and recorded a vocal and a guitar part, then mixed it down. Now, one of the original lines I had in the demo snippet on my phone was “downsize your emotions” an allusion to jetisoning emotional baggage, but using the figurative notion of moving to a smaller house. Clive-upon-Sea liked the original song but thought that phrase sounded a bit like…

I got a tipoff about Clouded Yellow (Colias croceus) on a lucerne/alfalfa and clover field in Aldreth a couple of days ago. Many dozens of them, apparently. I had a look a couple of days ago, but it was cloudy and windy and we only saw maybe a couple of dozen. A day later with better conditions, perhaps 50 or so (female helice form seen). But, I did a proper walk around the perimeter of the fields on 25th September (with permission from the farmer) and counted 108 as well as many dozens of…

A week in September in Port de Sóller, Mallorca (15th-21st), for sun, sea, mountain-trail hiking, and more. Goat-haunted paths with Blue Rock Thrush, Firecrest and Mediterranean Spotted Flycatcher, Booted Eagle, Kestrel, Red Kite, Raven, Cinereous Vulture, Audouin’s Gull and Herring, Yellow-legged Gull, Little Egret. Fergus Style Soller Beach Butterflies and moths were less numerous, but Lang’s Short-tailed Blue was everywhere, with numerous Vestal, lots of Hummingbird Hawk-moth, two possible…

Clif is so big they won’t fit in the frame… This is the enormous Clifden Nonpareil moth, Catocala fraxini, wingspan is about 75-95mm, this one was probably 85-90mm. The species was extinct in the UK by the middle of the 20th Century, having been resident in Kent and Norfolk until then. But, it has made a comeback in the southern counties in recent years as migrants settle and breed here. Incidentally, even though it’s called C. fraxini, that’s something of a misnomer, as it’s larval foodplant…

At this time of year, the moth trap starts to change character. As I mentioned a couple of days ago, we’ve had the local rise and fall of the Large Yellow Underwings. There has been an increase in frequency of one or two of the orangey-yellow-brown moths, such as the Frosted Orange and the Centre-barred Sallow alongside the cohorts that are here all summer, such as Flounced Rustic, Shuttle-shaped Dart, Setaceous Hebrew Character etc. Frosted Orange I’ve been mothing long enough to have a fairly…

There is something comforting/disconcerting [del. as applic.] about looking up at the stars and planets in the night sky, the wonder of the crescent moon, the Milky Way, the firmament…the vastness of all that eternity out there. And, as I’ve mentioned before, there’s a great Peter Cook quote where he says the view when he looks up just makes him realise how insignificant they all are! But, of course, they’re not insignificant to stargazers and astronomers. However, those in the know realise…

One of the most striking things in the annual garden moth-trap data is the rises and falls, and then the big surge, of the Large Yellow Underwing, Noctua pronuba. For much of the year, its numbers are surprisingly modest. Most trapping sessions produce somewhere between zero and ten moths, and early in the year it is rare to see any at all. But punctuating that low background are some conspicuous little explosions in mid-summer: for me this year around 25 to 30 moths on 16th June, again on 9th…

There comes a point in any long-running biological recording project when “new” becomes a rather more interesting word. This year is my 9th year of mothing, I started on 24th July 2018. Most years I count around 8000-9000 specimens of 300-370 species. This year has been a recordbreaker with almost 15,000 moths recorded in the garden so far and passed 400+ distinct species. I’ve even managed to see 40 or so NFGs (new-for-garden) species. In previous years that number has been way higher, but…

There was a shiny moth sitting on the sheet behind the trap last night when we returned from our evening’s entertainment, I didn’t immediately recognise the species, so potted it for a closer look. Golden Twin-spot, Chrysodeixis chalcites. It didn’t seem to be mentioned on the latest updates on our county mothing site nor in the Cambs online discussion group. So, I was vaguely excited that my specimen of this rare migrant from the Continent might have been a first for the county. I asked our…

ObsIdentify and similar nature ID apps can be frustratingly flaky. Anyone who has used them regularly will have seen some spectacularly confident wrong answers. I had a warbler in a tree that one app thought was a harbour seal and another obvious beetle that it flagged as some kind of American rodent! Yet there is another side to the story: sometimes it is astonishingly good, particularly when used to confirm an identification you already know almost for sure rather than to make one from…

The UK has five owl species that are well known and often encountered, but seeing any of them depends on where you live and perhaps knowing how and where to look. Some are surprisingly easy to find, while others are much more secretive. And, of course, some are hunters of the night and much harder to spot. Barn Owl The Barn Owl is probably the easiest of Britain’s owls to tick. Head for farmland with margins, ditches and road edges at dusk on a dry evening, and you might see one hunting…

As the years go by, each mothing season gets perhaps more samey. The usual suspects become very familiar, and the NFGs (new for the garden) become few and far between. Obviously, the first season you record everything is NFG, and then for a year or two after, there’s the ebb and flow of species so that you still see lots of novelty. Clay Triple-lines moth on a piece of similarly coloured wood Now that I’ve been mothing for 9 seasons, I don’t expect to see many NFGs at all. For 2026, it’s been…

Some time ago, I used some music tools to reimagine 30 of my old songs. You can listen to the new versions and also click through to the originals here. The stories were all written and recorded over the last 15 years or so, straddling many different genres from rock and pop to funk and soul. I cannot claim that there was ever a narrative arc, after all these are just 30 of some 200+ songs I’ve written and recorded in that time. However, in reimagining the songs as if I had a proper record…

I’ve been in the business a long time…since the 80s…would you believe? My contacts list is long, needless to say, many thousands of people and still growing on an almost daily basis. Over the years, I’ve had a lot of random messages, in the post, by fax, then email as other people gradually got online, and, of course, via my websites and social media. When I rebranded Sciencebase a little while ago to randomly mark its 27th anniversary online (July 2026), not counting the five years since my…

The Marsh Pearl or Anania perlucidalis to those who prefer their taxonomy with a Greco-Latin twist and a side of taxonomic musical chairs. Formerly dubbed the Fenland Pearl (a name that proved far too geographically localised), this modest little grass moth (Crambidae) is living proof that nature loves to rewrite the maps when entomologists aren’t looking. Marsh Pearl, Anania perlucidalis It has shimmering, pearly-white wings spanning just 21 to 23 millimetres, it wears its pale brown markings…

It’s easy enough to use ObsID or similar apps, Google Lens, or whatever you prefer to get a quick identification for the wildlife you photograph. But all apps can fail when there’s ambiguity in a photograph. I’ve had at least one plant photo that one app thought was a harbour seal. Moreover, some apps will give you a name that isn’t the vernacular name used in your region, so you might occasionally imagine you’ve found some rare bunting when, in fact, it was just a Yellowhammer, or whatever.…

Three scarce and vulnerable moths of the Cambridgeshire and Huntingdonshire landscape, the Four-spotted (Tyta luctuosa), Marsh Carpet (Gagitodes sagittata), and Silver-barred (Deltote bankiana), illustrate an important principle for nature recovery: it is not enough to provide the right foodplant. We need to restore the habitat system in which that plant naturally belongs. The Four-spotted is associated with warm, open, sparsely vegetated ground. Its larvae feed on Field Bindweed, normally…

Every moth-er gradually develops an instinctive eye for what “normal” looks like after handling hundreds, if not thousands, of moths each season. An Elephant Hawk-moth should be about this big. A Silver Y about that big. Most individuals fall comfortably within those expectations. Every so often you find an unusually large or unusually small specimen, but they’re exceptions. This year has felt different. A couple of nights ago I caught an Elephant Hawk-moth no bigger than a Small Elephant…

The name Oak Processionary moth has an almost whimsical ring to it, conjuring up an image of tiny insects dutifully marching through the woods in orderly file. The reality is rather less charming. Native to central and southern Europe, Thaumetopoea processionea was once little more than an occasional visitor to Britain, with adult males drifting across the Channel to the south coast in late summer. That changed in 2006 when breeding populations were discovered in West London. Since then, the…

My eighth anniversary of garden mothing and an oddity turned up in our Cambridgeshire garden last night. A moth new for the garden (NFG), although that’s not particularly odd, I get a few dozen NFGs every year. But, this one, Dusky-lemon Sallow (Cirrhia gilvago) is reported in Manley’s British Moths and Butterflies as being on the wing from August to October species. Dusky-lemon Sallow camouflaged quite nicely on an old pitted log Now, it’s only just over a week or so until August, but other…

The Ni Moth (Trichoplusia ni) is a rare migrant to the UK. At first glance, it’s not too dissimilar to the more common migrant the Silver Y (Autographa gamma). They’re both plusia-type moths, noctuids in the group Plusiinae. While the perhaps more familiar Silver Y has a silvery-white “Y”, or Greek gamma-shaped, marking on its forewings, the Ni has something not dissimilar, almost like a broken version of the gamma where a white spot sits adjacent to an arc. The early naturalists whimsically…

The Small Mottled Willow, Spodoptera exigua, is a species of moth in the family Noctuidae. Its larvae are highly polyphagous, feeding on a wide variety of herbaceous plants, including both wild and cultivated species. The larvae can cause significant crop damage under favourable conditions, particularly in intensive agricultural systems, and the species is therefore regarded as an important pest in many parts of the world. Small Mottled Willow on a log. Unusually its forewings are not curled…

A member of our Wild Fen Edge Whatsapp group alerted members to the presence of Wasp Spiders in one of our local nature reserves, specifically on the edge of the small woodland adjacent to Wort’s Meadow in Landbeach, Cambs. It’s 8 years since I last saw a Wasp Spider, Argiope bruennichi, and that was at RSPB Lakenheath. So, I thought I’d take a look. View of the upperside of the Wasp Spider’s abdomen showing its waspish pattern; photo also shows the web’s zig-zag stabilimentum The WFE member…

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