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?’

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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.

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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.

Here’s her website.

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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.

@dioramarestaurant不思議な世界 ジオラマ食堂のご予約をお待ちしてます！ 0667762460へお電話ください🩷 #ジオラマ食堂

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Thing 5 – Eco

Just Umberto Eco looking for a book.

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Thing 6 – Dog

Live your life like this dog.

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