Now that the wildlife is mostly tucked away for the winter and all is quiet out there, it is time to turn my attention to reviewing my wildlife highlights for 2025. It is truly a labour of love to trawl through the photos taken in the meadows and the wood over the past twelve months and come up with a selection of the most interesting. I will be using these in my reviews of the year coming soon! Before I start that, though, I first asked my family to send me their most memorable wildlife photo of the year. It was fun to see what they came up with, and I now present these to you here.

We have five children and I start with the youngest, Lizzie, who went truffle hunting with Gianfranco and his dog Mina in Piedmont, Northern Italy, in October.

Mina is a Lagotto Romagnolo, a breed of dog known as the best truffle hunters in the world, and she dug up four white truffles whilst Lizzie was with her. The truffle is the fruiting body of a fungus that grows underground, forming a symbiotic relationship with the tree roots. It needs to be eaten in order to disperse and so develops an appetising smell which gets stronger as it matures. By October, the aroma is detectable above ground by animals with a keen sense of smell such as badgers and wild boar. They will dig them up and eat them, then spread the truffle spores in their droppings.

Jonny, who moved to Brighton this autumn, took himself down to the seafront at dusk and captured the Brighton Piers’ starling murmuration on his phone.

Before they left for Brighton, our daughter-in-law Hayley got amazing video footage of up to ten red kites who came to tea in their back garden in Maidenhead after she had thrown some scraps out. Red kites generally feed by swooping low, grabbing the food with their feet and not landing on the ground. However, at Hayley’s red kite tea party that afternoon most of her visitors eventually landed down onto the lawn:

Our daughter Sally has sent this photo of a rose-crowned fruit dove that she thought was the most beautiful bird she’d ever seen. It lives high in the canopy of the rainforests of Northern and Eastern Australia and Southern Indonesia and eats various fruits from the trees and vines. This is not where she saw it though – she saw it in a zoo in Honfleur when she was on holiday with her family in France this summer:

Her husband Adam found a very large elephant hawk moth caterpillar in their garden in Kent in August. The species was apparently given this common name because of the caterpillar’s resemblance to an elephant’s trunk:

But when he gently nudged it with a twig, it rapidly transformed itself into something that looks a lot more scary:

Our other son Jonty, together with his wife Ellie, accompanied us to Elmley Nature Reserve on the Isle of Sheppey back in January where we stayed overnight in shepherds huts in the heart of the reserve. We were most unfortunate though because Storm Herminia was in full swing whilst we were there, meaning that we saw very little wildlife and got very wet. By way of consolation, the wildlife guide showed us where there was a magnificent long-eared owl roosting in some deep cover. This is a bird that Jonty and Ellie had never seen and of which we had never before got such good views:

The four of us are going to try again and are returning to Elmley next month, hoping for better weather this time.

In the depths of December’s gloom, it is impossible not to be cheered by Ellie’s photo below of buff-tailed bumblebees. It was taken in July in the gardens of the large crop protection company she works for near Maidenhead:

Our eldest child Sarah moved with her family to Cornwall this summer. However, she and our little grandson stayed with us in Kent last week and visited Wingham Wildlife Park where a Bornean orangutang put on a good show for them:

All three species of orangutang are now critically endangered and zoo populations are crucial, serving as vital insurance populations and genetic reservoirs. They can also be used to raise awareness of the habitat loss due to palm oil plantations which is one of their biggest threats.

Sarah also took this photo on her phone of a hummingbird hawkmoth when visiting Trelissick gardens near Truro in Cornwall:

These lovely moths feed from the nectar of tube-shaped flowers, using their long proboscis and whilst hovering in the air – they are notoriously difficult to photograph and have frustrated me many times, even with the speed whacked right up on my camera.

We are looking forward to getting to know Cornwall’s distinctive wildlife a bit better as we visit Sarah and her family in the coming years.

My brother likes Cornwall too and he sent me this photo of a grey seal haul out on the Roseland Peninsula in Cornwall in February. What a lovely sight this is:

He also took this photo of a grey heron from the back door of his home in Somerset:

His wife, Julie, found this beautiful moth, a scarlet tiger moth, in their Somerset garden in May. It has a largely westerly distribution and I haven’t ever seen one of these:

She also found a garden tiger moth caterpillar at Three Cliffs Bay on The Gower in South Wales in April. It looks really quite extraordinary, like a piece of old badger fur:

One of my brother’s sons is in a different league to the rest of the family as far as wildlife photography goes. He lived in the US for several years before moving back to England this summer. Before he left, he took this photo of a bull moose in the Rocky Mountains National Park, Colorado:

And this amazing photo is of a subadult grizzly bear in Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming:

My sister’s wildlife photo of the year is of a lovely mallard’s nest that they found at the bottom of their garden in Berkshire this spring:

This was not an ideal spot for the mother duck to have chosen and they were worried about how she was going to lead her ducklings to the river once the eggs hatched. In the end, however, this wasn’t an issue because sadly the nest was abandoned.

My sister does have another wildlife photo, this time taken inside her house. Although this was actually in October 2024, it was so astonishing that I’ve included it anyway. She had the french windows open that day and a polecat wandered into her sitting room and had a poke around:

There are quite a lot of dogs in the family and one of my sister’s daughters actually now has three. Here is lovely little Skye who she took in to temporarily foster this year and of course ended up keeping her:

I finish this round up of my family’s wildlife year with Dave and my favourite photos. Back in May, we were with the Amphibian and Reptile Trust who were showing us the reptiles and amphibians of Dorset as part of a four day holiday. The smooth snake is Britain’s rarest snake and Dave never dreamed that he would ever see one, let alone actually hold one. This image of him with a smooth snake is his photo of the year:

Smooth snakes are only found on heathlands in Dorset, Hampshire and Surrey. It is a non-venomous constrictor, coiling up around its prey of sand lizards, slow-worms, insects and nestlings to subdue them, often crushing them to death.

In June we caught the sleeper up to Aberdeen and then the overnight ferry on to Shetland. The Shetland Isles are remote from the rest of the World and, as a result, some species have evolved in isolation and are now only found there. Before very long at all I had fallen in love with the Shetland bee:

Only found on Shetland and the Western Isles, the Shetland bee is strikingly large and intensely coloured, and is quite simply an absolute corker.

Shetland also has its own wren subspecies. Since there are so few trees to hide within on the islands, the Shetland wren is used to being out in the open and is easy to photograph:

This wren is darker than the mainland form with a longer bill and stronger legs.

I have very much enjoyed pulling together this collection of my family’s wildlife photographs for 2025. They should now be forewarned that I will be asking them again next year, so hopefully they will be ready with some more good ones!