Category Archives: Wonders of Nature

The Wild Verges Award

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You’re perambulating along, by foot or bike or car (or whatever your preference), and you see a particularly lovely patch of roadside wilderness that has been allowed to grow untrimmed, and now it’s waving gently in the breeze. You may want to say “Well done!” And now you can, with the Sketching Weakly Wild Verges Award. Simply cut out & nominate the stretch of road where your lovely verge was, and send to your local county council strimming department.

Cut out & keepPersonally I’d nominate the top of the A4144 where it meets the A423 in Oxford.

And this bit of Regent’s Park for nice Cow Parsley:

Regents park

The swifts are back

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swiftsThey’re squealing across the sky.

spacecatBonzetta, our Animals Correspondent, points out:

Technically none of the above birds is a swift.

This is a swift:

swiftThey’ve been in southern and equatorial Africa for the winter and they spend all their lives miraculously on the wing. Almost impossible to catch but delicious as a pre-dinner snack, possibly with a tasty dipping sauce.

Note: Sketching Weakly is not endorsing serving swifts as a cocktail party snack, and thinks they are much better left freewheeling their way round the sky. Here’s some more about the incredible Swift, and also about how modern houses don’t have the sorts of holes in them swifts need to make their nests in.