Familiar as the bristly plant that easily hooks on to our clothing as we walk through the countryside or do the gardening, cleavers uses its hooks to help it climb and to disperse its seeds.

The grey squirrel was introduced into the UK in the 1800s. It provides an easy encounter with wildlife for many people, but can be damaging to woodlands and has contributed to the decline of the…

The Azure damselfly is a pale blue, small damselfly that is commonly found around most waterbodies from May to September. Try digging a wildlife pond in your garden to attract damselflies and…

The black garden ant is the familiar and abundant small ant that lives in gardens, but also turns up indoors searching for sugary food. In summer, winged adults, or 'flying ants', swarm…

Did you know that there are coral reefs in the UK? UK seas are home to some amazing cold-water corals that form reefs on the seabed over 400m deep.

Unsurprisingly, the garden bumblebee can be found in the garden, buzzing around flowers like foxgloves, cowslips and red clover. It is quite a large, scruffy-looking bee, with a white tail. It…

A member of the buttercup family, Common water-crowfoot displays white, buttercup-like flowers with yellow centres. It can form mats in ponds, ditches and streams during spring and summer.

Look out for the white, umbrella-like flower heads of lesser water-parsnip along the shallow margins of ditches, ponds, lakes and rivers. When crushed, it does, indeed, smell like parsnip!

This elegant wading bird is a rare visitor to the UK, though occasionally one or two of pairs will nest here.

The Land caddis is the only caddisfly in the UK to spend its entire time on land, with no stage in water. Look in oak leaf litter over winter to see the grainy cases of the larvae, in which they…