Six (Brief) Things
Egret | Encounter | Garden | Cat | Eco | Dog
Thing 1 – Egret
Once a month I go to Mitcham Ponds to carry out a survey for the British Trust for Ornithology.
It is, in truth, not an onerous task – a pond on an urban common, home to ducks and geese and cormorants and sometimes a little grebe or two, and maybe a heron. My surveys amount to a single tiny pixel in the big picture of waterbird population monitoring in the UK.
But sometimes you get a pleasant surprise. This great white egret, for example – note how it is both studiously ignoring and being studiously ignored by the residents.
I’ll write more about it on Friday, but suffice it to say that my first reaction was ‘bloody hell’, and my second a more measured ‘gosh, you really are beautiful, aren’t you?’
Thing 2 – Encounter
Purveyor of excellence Melissa Harrison (whose Substack Witness Marks I recommend) unveiled her new project this week: a guided nature journal app called Encounter. I think this counts as a Good Thing, and urge you to sign up for updates ahead of its release next summer.
Thing 3 – Garden
Look, I’m not saying my wife is a gardening genius but she has made our smallish (depending on your definition of ‘small’) London garden a relentlessly pleasant place to be for humans and non-humans alike, so I think she might in fact be a gardening genius.
Thing 4 – Cat
There is a TikTok account devoted to videos of model trains encountering cats on the line. I commend it to the house.
Tiktok failed to load.Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser
Thing 5 – Eco
Just Umberto Eco looking for a book.
Thing 6 – Dog
Live your life like this dog.
My first read of Six Things as will not be the last. A joy to receive something so thoughtful and very 'grab-able' Thank you Lev, very much
Tim in Wiltshire
Worth it for the cats alone. Surreal & terrifying