Now, as winter takes its hold and a lot of our wildlife has tucked itself away until the return of spring, I turn my attention to remembering the year that’s nearly over and rejoicing in its highlights. The annual reviews of the meadows and the wood will be arriving before too long but, before I start on that enjoyable task, I have once more asked my family to send me their most memorable wildlife photos of 2026. It’s been such fun to see what they came up with.

Our son Jonny and his wife did a lot of travelling this summer and one of the places they visited was Madagascar, a large island sitting in the Indian Ocean, 250 miles off the coast of East Africa. Every year humpback whales migrate up from the cold of Antarctica to breed and nurse their calves in the warmer waters around Madagascar. Jonny and Hayley went on a boat trip and saw at least a dozen of them, including a group of males fighting over a female. This humpback, half breaching out of the water, is a dramatic way to start the post:

The mossy leaf-tailed gecko, endemic to Madagascar, is a truly amazing thing. I had to inspect the photo below for some time before I spotted the creature lying, head downwards, along the central vertical branch:

Our youngest daughter Lizzie was staying in a chateau with a lovely garden in Provence, southern France, for a wedding this summer when she spotted this violet carpenter bee:

Lizzie and her partner have recently moved to Walthamstow where, one morning, they had a strange feeling that they were being watched whilst they were making coffee:

Our son Jonty was travelling for work in Hong Kong this October when he decided to go for a walk in the hills behind the city. He came upon this giant golden orb-weaver spider, Nephila pilipes, sitting on her web beside the path. The size of her stopped him in his tracks, since her leg span was bigger than his stretched-out hand:

The body length of a female giant golden orb-weaver is up to 50mm. In contrast, though, the males are tiny with a body length of only 4 to 6mm.

In their garden in Berkshire this summer, Jonty and Ellie also saw this leafcutter bee. She was carrying an enormous piece of leaf, cut into a beautiful circle, that she was going to incorporate into her nest:

In recent years our daughter Sally and her family have become bird watchers and, of course, we are really pleased about that. This is Sally’s lovely photo of the humble chaffinch with its crest up:

And another really pleasing photo of a song thrush:

And she was a bit shocked by the size and vigour of this southern hawker dragonfly that flew into her house one day:

We visited our daughter Sarah in Cornwall in September where she showed us the eel that lives under the small bridge close to their house:

The European eel population in the UK has experienced a catastrophic decline of 90 to 95% over the last forty years and they are now critically endangered. This eel will probably take several years to mature in the freshwater stream next to Sarah before it swims back down to the sea and migrates across the Atlantic to breed and die in the Sargasso Sea

My sister and her husband sent me this uplifting display of daffodils at the bottom of their garden in rural Berkshire in March:

Their youngest daughter Kat visited Georgia on the eastern shores of the Black Sea with her boyfriend in August. She took the photo below when they were hiking up near the Russian border where free-roaming wild and semi-wild horses inhabit the high meadows of the Caucasus Mountains:

Their middle daughter Lucie got married this year and went on a honeymoon to the Orkney Isles. On their way home they stopped off at Chanonry Point, just north of Inverness, to watch the dolphins:

Their oldest daughter Josie and her husband sent me a photo of their young son who was found with his head in the mouth of a crocodile:

And their son Hugh and his family were holidaying in Dubai in February when the political situation got nasty and they had difficulty getting home. Whilst they were in Dubai, though, they went for a walk but found their path blocked by peacocks, one of whom jumped up onto a wall and posed for a photograph:

I hadn’t realised that there are several different species of peacock. The normal species to see in the UK is the Indian peafowl with a blue body that is native to the Indian subcontinent. This one with a green body, however, is the green peafowl, native to Southeast Asia from Myanmar down to Java.

Growing and carrying such a cumbersome train of feathers takes a lot of energy and makes the bird more vulnerable to predation. It is therefore a signal to the female about how strong and healthy the male is and what excellent genes he would pass on to the next generation.

The Cheddar Valley Line in Somerset was a Great Western Railway branch line that became nicknamed The Strawberry Line because of the volume of locally grown strawberries that it used to carry. It closed in 1963 and has since been transformed into an award-winning, traffic-free path from the Mendips down to the sea. My brother and his wife Julie live close by and Julie has been doing a monthly insect survey this year along a 200m transect of land there. She records all that she sees which is then verified by experts and reported to a national database. She saw this willow emerald damselfly on one of her surveys:

Julie also sent me this photo of mating orange-tip butterflies that they saw in Cambridgeshire whilst out walking with their son:

Dave’s sister Chris and her husband went to Australia this autumn to visit their older son Tom. They saw this sulphur-crested parakeet whilst in the south east of the country. What a lovely bird:

Tom lives in Perth in Western Australia, but back in June he and his partner were holidaying in Malaysia. They spent a night in a bat cave in the enormous Taman Negara rainforest with their guide guarding the entrance with a machete against panthers and elephants. The next morning they came across this extraordinary animal with a very long neck when they were hiking in the reserve:

This is the violin beetle, Mormolyce phyllodes, a ground beetle that can measure up to 10cm and is a fierce predator. Its long neck means that it can reach deep into cracks and crevices to grab its soft invertebrate prey.

In the heatwave of June, Tom’s younger brother Mark did the Welsh Three Peaks challenge – climbing Snowdon in North Wales, Cadair Idris in Mid Wales and Pen y Fan in South Wales.

Any photos that Dave and I have taken in the meadows and the wood will be included in the reviews of the year coming soon. But there are many other memorable wildlife photos that we have taken elsewhere this year and here are my three of my favourites. The first is of a fiery clearwing moth down on the shingle beach in front of Walmer Castle:

We know that there are glow-worms in the wood because we have seen the larvae, but we have never been there in the gathering dusk in June to see the adult females glow. This June, however, we were staying in Warren Cottage in the middle of Tiger Hill nature reserve in rural Suffolk. As it got dark we went out to identify bats, but instead found seven small but intense green spots of light in the garden. Using a torch and the camera flash we managed to get photos of these female glow-worms as their abdomens shined brightly, calling the males in to them:

We were in Cornwall in September and went on a five-hour nature-watching boat trip out of Falmouth. The highlight of the trip for me was the pod of common dolphins that started bow-riding the boat as we were returning to harbour. Up to eleven of them were there for ages since they just seemed to be really enjoying themselves:

Dave has selected two photos as his most memorable of the year. We were on North Uist in July and I was determined to see a great yellow bumblebee, a large and distinctive species found only on Orkney and some of the Hebridean islands, including North Uist. But, despite spending a long time searching, I completely failed to see one. Dave, however, not only saw one but also got this great photo:

In early May we were out walking in a small woodland of mature trees at dusk, trying to identify what species of bats were flying around our heads. We were finding it really difficult because we didn’t really know what we were doing, but the evening took on an unexpected turn when Dave spotted two tawny owl chicks in one of the trees. All the frustration over the bats was immediately forgotten:

An unforgettable wildlife moment indeed.

I cannot complete this family post without mentioning the holiday we went on in May to the Isles of Scilly with all of our children and their families. We were a bit unlucky with the weather, and as a result many of the things we had been planning to do were cancelled, but there was much happy rock pooling and exploring of the islands:

And I finish this post with a photo of our lovely old dog who has just celebrated her thirteenth birthday. Here she is in August at a special picnic that was being held at the top of the meadows when Lizzie’s partner Sheff proposed to her and she said a very definite yes.

What a joy it has been to curate this collection of images taken this year by my family, photos that have whisked us away on a whistle-stop tour around the world, as well as celebrating the wonderful nature that we have around us here in the United Kingdom. I already can’t wait to see what they come up with in 2027.