I have a confession to make: over the course of all the visits I’ve made to the UK, I’ve not once seen a live badger (emphasis on the “live”). So when I make my next trip, I’ll most certainly be consulting the new “RSPB British Naturefinder” by Marianne Taylor.
It was Aristotle, in the first book of his “Nichomachean Ethics,” who wrote, “For one swallow does not make a summer, nor does one day; and so too one day, or a short time, does not make a man blessed and happy” to conclude his point that the cultivation of virtue takes prolonged effort and a great amount of time.
Yaffle. The very first time I heard this widely used British colloquial name for the Green Woodpecker I was instantly taken by it. Thought to have been derived in the Eighteenth Century from the call made by the species, yaffle so well expresses the Zeitgeist of this ground-loving member of the woodpecker family that once learned it’s difficult to call it by its official common name.
Although a copy of the new “RSPB Spotlight: Hedgehogs” by James Lowen arrived from Bloomsbury a few months ago, I delayed adding it to the Newly Noted column in order to better align it with an annual threat to its subject: Bonfire Night bonfires.