Hello Again....

Hello All,

It’s been a huge amount of time since I’ve posted on here so I thought it was about time to catch up with some old friends and hopefully find a few new friends also!

It must be three years since I vanished from what really is one of the best wildlife forums online so I thought I’d post a little update of what I’ve been up to and explain why I disappeared!

When I was last on here some of you will remember that I was struggling with a bad hip, well that was sorted out with the addition of a new joint of the ceramic variety. This obviously not only put me out of action for some time but forced a premature retirement from the emergency services!

Needing an income, I set about starting a little business, but I was keen to try and focus this around my passion for wildlife, nature and of course my long-time enjoyment of gardening for wildlife.

As you can imagine as a newbie to business this has commanded a huge amount of my time and I have had to focus most of my time and effort on growing the business into something where I may actually make some sort of living out of it (maybe!) It’s amazing how much I really didn’t and still don’t know!!

I have tried to really focus on the ‘wildlife’ and ‘creating wildlife habitat’ side of gardening and garden design, but when you really specialise like this you limit your customer base to some degree. Therefore we started with more ‘average’ garden designs but encouraged people to have planting schemes for pollinators or wildlife ‘friendly’ hedges instead of fences where possible. This was a great starting place but we are now moving firmly towards real ‘wildlife’ gardens as we are getting known for this type of work and as you can imagine this kind of recognition is really encouraging. Alongside the garden design and practical ‘on your hands and knees’ side of the business, I also build bird boxes and timber products from locally sourced reclaimed materials, I still do a bit of ‘wildlife themed’ photography and use this to sell ‘wildlife themed’ greeting cards, calendars and other similar products. I also use my pictures in the wildlife presentations that I give, and have recently been asked to join the RHS speakers list where my subject is wildlife and gardening for wildlife (I think I’ve created a bit of a stir with some of the traditionalists as my ‘radical’ and out of the box ideas such as gardening for insects and allowing them eat your plants is very different to the well behaved rows of bedding plants that many are used to!) I also run wildlife events for a couple of charitable businesses, that are usually in the form of moth traps or bug/insect walks and recently we were featured on Countryfile for some of our moth recording work we have done at a community farm near to here. Finally we are just starting to supply a few wildlife friendly plants and our own Buddleia collection is up to about forty species! So all in all I’ve managed to pull a little bit off of each of these pots and at least created some kind of business! I can honestly say that it has been and continues to be a very interesting journey!

For those of you who remember my daughter, fondly nicknamed ‘Higlet’ by some on here, she is now 12 and going on 18 very quickly!! She seems to have drifted away from the wildlife stuff that we enjoyed together and that I used to report about on here. But I’m happy that she has a good knowledge base that she will always be able to use to enjoy nature in later life as I did. It is so important that our kids have a good foundation of knowledge about the beautiful world we live in and the wonderful wildlife within it, as they are the next generation to hopefully carry on the good, and often vital work started by some great people in recent years.

Much of my online time is spent on facebook these days and it’s been fab having a few old friends from here pop up on my facebook pages to say hello, I really have appreciated and enjoyed this! I mention no names (Wendy Barter you are now officially the ‘Top Fan’ complete with badge, check it out!)  ooops I said mention no names! 

As my days out with the camera have been rather ‘limited’ recently I can’t think of any funny stories that I can tell you and I certainly haven't been on any comedy middle of the night 'badger stake outs' recently!!. I do however have a nice little success story about an extremely rare Horsefly, but to ensure that I keep coming back I will save that one for my next post! So rather than rambling on anymore, I’ll say hello once again and leave you with a few pictures so that you can see what I’ve been up to over the last three years or so also...

Cheers

Higgy