Hornet mimic hoverfly
With black-and-yellow markings, the hornet mimic hoverfly looks like its namesake, but is harmless to us. This mimicry helps to protect it from predators while it searches for nectar.
Water vole by Terry Whittaker/2020VISION
With black-and-yellow markings, the hornet mimic hoverfly looks like its namesake, but is harmless to us. This mimicry helps to protect it from predators while it searches for nectar.
Beautiful demoiselle’s are, well, beautiful! Often confused for a dragonfly, these giants of the damselfly world are hard to miss with their metallic blue and green colours.
Look for common toadflax on waste ground and grassland, and along roadside verges and hedgerows. Its yellow-and-orange flowers are tightly packed on a tall spike and have distinctive 'spurs…
This pretty, speckled moth is now a rare sight, found only in a few parts of southern England.
This dazzling dragonfly can be seen darting above tree-lined ponds in certain parts of Britain.
By providing safe places for hedgehogs to live, you’re much more likely to see these prickly creatures in your garden.
Help hedgehogs get around by making holes and access points in fences and barriers to link up the gardens in your neighbourhood.
This small, white heron is an increasingly common sight in parts of the UK as it spreads north from continental Europe.
This slim fish is usually found on gravelly parts of the seabed, close to shore, but can turn up in rockpools.
The Marsh helleborine is a beautiful orchid of fens, wet grassland and dune slacks. Growing in profusion in places, look for reddish stems and white-and-pink flowers.
Red squirrels are native to the UK but are a lot rarer than their grey cousins. They live in a few special places across the UK thanks to reintroduction projects.
The delicate, tube-like, violet-blue flowers of Skullcap bloom from June to September in damp places, such as marshes, fens, riverbanks and pond margins.