Nicola Chester

Nature Writer and Activist

Blog

  • Nature Notes

    Harvest Home. At last, harvest is in. Returning home, I swing the car slowly into our field entrance of a car park and come up against the header of the combine, powering down with the roar of bees. The field looks as if it’s been wiped out by a desert sandstorm, the air filled with […]

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  • Nature Notes

    Urban Bats: A Night out on the Town Friday night, and I’ve a rare night out on the town; but instead of heels, I’ve opted for pumps and instead of a handbag, I’ve shouldered my binoculars. In an inspired collaboration between our freshly refurbished local museum (West Berks) and our local Wildlife Trust (BBOWT) a […]

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  • Nature Notes

    Summer’s Gone It’s been a strange summer. In a last hurrah, we try ticking off some of the ‘Things we’d like to do over the Summer Holidays’ list. On Wiltshire’s great plains, Avebury’s standing stones shone with running water and Cherhill’s white horse cried over the harvest. Everything was at a standstill. The combines dripped […]

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  • Nature Notes

    Chemical Ruin & A Fly Shaped Absence. Wait. Another of our songbirds is missing. Its disappearance has been worrying away at the frayed fabric of my summers in recent years – their usual perches and glad, familiar silhouettes, vacant. It isn’t an iconic summer visitor like a cuckoo, or a turtle dove, a nightingale, swallow, swift or […]

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  • Nature Notes

    Love Letter to North Devon. Fifteen years ago, shortly before I fell pregnant with the first of our three children, my parents moved from the west of West Berks to North Devon. It was a wrench – but no more so than now, when they are moving again. We fell in love with a place I […]

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  • Nature Notes

    Ant Weddings and the Little Death. It is flying ant day. It took me a moment to make sense of the little golden lights rising gently from the fault line between the lawn and the garden path, like the slow release of a strange and rather magical energy force. The first I hear of it […]

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  • Nature Notes

    A Reveal of Badgers. On a dull, warm evening, we walked off the edge of the down and crept into the hanging wood and its badger sett. Without the sun to break through the mixed broadleaf and coniferous canopy, it felt prematurely dark. Behind us, a pheasant release pen of young birds coughed and crowed […]

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  • Nature Notes

    Butterflying. You will probably know, this year’s Big Butterfly Count is on. It only takes 15 minutes and can be done anywhere there might be a few butterflies, and you can do as many ‘counts’ as you like. I may have cheated this week, when I did one trotting down a lane past downland banks […]

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  • Nature Notes

    I know a place where the wild thyme blows … Where you can find it, chalk grassland is at its most romantic and sensual now. The short, springy turf is a riot of richly fragrant colour, alive with its associated butterflies, bees, other insects and birds. The sward is necessarily low, chalk plants have adapted […]

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  • Nature Notes

    The Plight of the Bumblebee The short walk to the horses’ field has become even more of a pleasure of late. Next to the otherwise lifeless, factory floor of wheat, a wide nectar strip has been planted. Bird’s foot trefoil, purple vetch and the pink pea flowers of sainfoin ramble through tall grasses. A single, […]

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