My own 'natural' environment is a city. I grew up in London and have lived there most of my adult life too. I enjoy the buzz of city life and the easy access to a wide range of restaurants, galleries and other culture. But when I travel I like to experience totally different environments.
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I know far too little about fungi species to ever pick one in the wild to eat. I don’t even touch them! But I do know that they are essential to our ecosystems.
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While many people head to Holland to see the tulips, we have London’s Holland Park. There the Dutch Gardens are planted with formal beds edged with low hedges and overflowing with tulips every spring.
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With a slow start to the spring this year it’s felt at times as if March was coming in more like a polar bear than a lion! We had sharp winds, frosts and even some snow as far south as London, although nothing like what they had further north. And even when the weather started to warm up, sunshine was in short supply.
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Just as humans (sadly) use knives and swords for attack and defence, so too do animals and plants. Whether it’s a thorn or spike to ward off predators, or a sharp tooth to attack their prey, there is always a point to sharpness in nature.
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Looking back I see that I have already in the past, several times, shared photos of animals’ eyes. I hate to duplicate but but I believe I’ve managed to dig out some new, and some not-yet-shared, images for this collection.
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Cocora was a princess, daughter of Acaime, chief of the local Quimbaya indigenous people. Today she lends her name to Colombia’s Cocora Valley, where the native wax palms (the national tree) grow up to 60 metres and live for about 200 years.
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A number of you seemed to enjoy seeing my Colombian orchids. Now Denzil gives me an excuse to share some more flowers from that beautiful country.
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It’s often said that the eyes are the windows into the soul, but many will claim that an animal doesn’t have a soul. However, soul or not, an animal’s eyes can certainly be very expressive.
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Colombia can claim to have one fifth of the world’s birds, an amazing 1,954 species. That said, we saw relatively few of them. This may be in part because we went to the wrong places at the wrong time of year. And in part because we’re not experts and neither did we do any specific bird-watching activities.
