Mark Cocker

2 days ago | countrylife.co.uk | Mark Cocker

Few of Britain's birds of prey are more difficult to see than the goshawk (Accipiter gentilis). Part of this challenge is simply being able to separate it from the more numerous, but smaller sparrowhawk. On paper, the two look radically different. Big female goshawks can weigh more than 4lb (2kg) and have a wingspan of 5ft (1.6m), which is longer even than a common buzzard’s. They can be as much as 10 times the weight of a small male sparrowhawk.

2 weeks ago | countrylife.co.uk | Mark Cocker

Second only to our eagles in size, with a wingspan of 5½ft, the osprey (Pandion haliaetus) is one of the most impressive of Britain's birds of prey. The signature drama attached to its name is considered one of the most awe-inspiring sights in all of British Nature. Ospreys are fish-eating and known to catch a wide variety of species, such as trout and salmon, but also pike, grey mullet, carp and even flounder.

2 weeks ago | theguardian.com | Mark Cocker

Examine any part of the horizon from our garden and you find the air freckled with slow-dreaming swarms of black dots. I’d hazard a guess that all of them are Bibio marci, a fly named because it’s said to emerge on the feast of Saint Mark – 25 April. All spider webs inspected thus far have contained their remains, but a larger revelation came from some cattle troughs 10 miles from here. The surface film was full of drowned insects.

4 weeks ago | irishtimes.com | Mark Cocker

Anyone interested in nature in Ireland or Britain is now assailed by versions of the word “wild”. Environmental professionals talk endlessly of “wilding” and “rewilding” the country. The introduction of long-absent animals – elks, bison and lynx – are hotly debated or, in the case of beavers, they are legally loosed into our rivers. Horticulturalists want to turn their gardens into mini versions of wilderness.

1 month ago | theguardian.com | Mark Cocker

This place, which straddles two eastern European countries, has a reputation as the continent’s last primeval forest – a glimpse of a world before it was smothered in ourselves and the homolith. To arrive at night is to tunnel through trees for mile after mile without end. And this, you realise, represents a fraction of the whole. Because beyond the border the Belorussian section of Białowieża is larger still.