When Em and I joined the RSPB at the far off Glenborrowdale Natural History Centre, we discovered that we had a bird reserve right on our doorstep. If truth be told I knew that there was ‘something’ in the Otmoor valley, but didn’t know it was RSPB or how you got there.

Accessed from an old Roman road, which I don’t think has altered much since the time of the Romans(!!) the reserve is lovely. Being a small one, we didn’t actually need to be members to go there, but that’s no the point. As we entered the reserve, we had to take care not to tread on hundreds of little baby frogs all frantically trying to hop from the left of the path to the right of the path. We saw lots of birds and butterflies and it was all very nice. It was also a complete sun trap under cloudless blue skies and scorching temperatures.

Or at least, I think it was a Chaffinch. It certainly wasn’t a Starling, or a Blue/Great Tit, and it looked too big to be a Sparrow. Em is the one who is good with birds, and I’m just a learner, but I think it was a Chaffinch, and if it was, then it was the first Chaffinch on my new feeding station. I’m not sure how many birds have coming to my feeder so far, but if it’s just this cheerful looking chappy then he’s going to be getting nicely big, fat and bilious on the birdseed… 🙂

Fergus Drennan
The Guardian Tuesday 18 September 2007, 12:00pm

For our hunter-gatherer ancestors, the hedgehog was meat for the pot. Today, it is an acquired taste – acquired by combing the verges of roads.

Making a meal of it: first, find a pair of gloves … Photograph: Niall Benvie/Corbis.

So, archaeologist Dr Fairchild of the University of Wales Institute in Cardiff has revealed that, 6,000 years ago, hedgehog was one of the choice or, more accurately, opportunistic meat finds for the Sunday roast. Our ancient ancestors may possibly have expressed their hairy lip-smacking and furry finger-licking appreciation of its unique culinary merits with deep hedgehog mimicking grunts of guttural satisfaction; but the question that needs answering is, what exactly does it taste like?

With the language and poetic yearnings to express themselves, how might aspiring Oz Clarks of the stone age have grappled with the highly subjective nature of taste and smell in describing the culinary pleasure of hedgehog munching? No doubt comparatives would abound – descriptive words and names drawn from a range of creatures now long extinct. Yet, to answer our question, we must turn to stories of gypsies, crisps, modern-day roadkill and contemporary edible beasts.

Well, hedgehogs are nowadays a protected species, of course, and gypsies (historically partial to a bit of hedgehog) were nowhere to be found; Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, perhaps our most celebrated roadkill connoisseur was, quite sensibly, unavailable for comment, and Arthur Boyt was too busy researching his roadkill cookbook, so this is forager-chef and sometime roadkill aficionado Fergus Drennan’s verdict:

“All wild meats have their own unique flavours and hedgehog is no exception. Of course, the classic descriptive cliche for practically any previously untried meat is that it either tastes like chicken or, more curiously, tuna. What I would say, then, is that if you bear in mind that badger tastes somewhat beefy, fox a lot like mountain goat, squirrel like a turkey-lamb chimera, seagull like a rich ducky pheasant with a whisker of cat, and mole like rabbit with a hint of liver, the flavour of hedgehog could be described as follows: delightful initial bursts of badgery foxiness transform into grungy pork nutty acorn with caramalised apple flavours, together playing a subtle counterpoint to a base rhythm of peaty earth and mole. This cacophonic complex of flavours reaches a wild boar crescendo, fading out with the distant cry of seagulls…

“The perfect accompaniments, naturally, being sautéed hedgehog fungus and roast chestnuts (less their spiny cases).”

Not unlike those notorious hedgehog-flavoured crisps of the 1980s, then – only minus the salt and potato.

Have you heard the story about the honey bee genome that’s taking world by storm? I certainly did. On Friday afternoon I pushed through the latest issue of Insect Molecular Biology in a record time of 2 hours and 26 minutes because the editors were doing a press release.

You can read all the articles for free (OnlineOpen don’t you know) here: http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/toc/imb/15/5 and tell yourself they passed across my computer screen first!

Nature though, have also got in on the act: http://www.nature.com/nature/focus/honeybee/index.html

…as have the BBC News website: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/6084974.stm

And not only that, but it was mentioned, in some depth, on Friday’s News Quiz: http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/comedy/newsquiz.shtml. If you are too late to hear it on Listen Again, here’s the excerpt from the show.