Stags develop a large set of antlers that grow with age. Starting with just two points, the antlers steadily develop more branches, reaching up to 16 in most cases. These antlers are shed and regrown every year. Females (hinds) lack antlers and are more lightly built than males.

These red deer are enjoying a mud bath in Richmond Park.

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This vixen is currently living in a den under our garden shed and has two cubs. Her task is made harder because she is limping.

Seen in May 2023.

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This one is nibbling on a sycamore seed. At the same time, filming for the TV series ‘Pennyworth’ was taking place just around the corner. The squirrel was unfazed

Seen in the gardens of Chiswick House in January 2022

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We stayed in a Plains tent, overlooking the Masai Mara.

There are no fences between the camp and the game, so one night we were lucky enough to be woken up by the sound of a wild elephant that was so close to our tent that we could hear it breathing. We heard hippos fighting in front of our tent. In the distance, we could hear lions and hyenas. The sight of hippos walking through the camp at night was magical.

For the first time, we had an hour long stop by a mother leaopard and her almost fully grown cub. She was resting, and he was chewing on the carcass of a springbox, which she had carried up on a branch around three mettres off then ground. As he gnawed at the neck, the skull detached and fell to the ground, narrowly missing the sleeping mother leopard. With an angry snarl, she got up and clambered up the tree to ‘have words’ with her son.

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Monkey World assists governments around the world to stop the smuggling of primates from the wild. At the Centre refugees of this illegal trade as well as those that have suffered abuse or neglect are rehabilitated into natural living groups.

There is nothing quite like looking into the eyes of an otrang-utan.

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The best part of the trip was in the otherwise luxurious conference hotel. During a speech by one of our keynote speakers, there was a flurry of excitement in one part of the audience that started at the back and swept through to the front. It was a large rat running under the seated participants.

The frightened rat ran across the carpet and dived into the only cover that it could see – which happened to the under speaker’s podium. The speaker stopped, hopped off the podium, and followed the rest of us into a side room where we found coffee and cookies. A hotel security guard pushed through us carrying a baseball bat and slipped into the conference room with a colleague.

A few moments later, he reappeared and announced that the rat had been “dealt with”, so we all went back into the conference room, and the speaker continued his speech.

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