Mark Cocker
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Naturalist and multi-prize-winning author. 13 books incl One Midsummer's Day, Our Place, Birds & People and Crow Country Guardian country diarist since '87.
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Articles by Mark Cocker
Country diary: A species brought to the edge of extinction, recovering in the fens
A great egret at Ouse Fen. ‘Then a bird would fly, the white rope of its neck rising, followed by a ragged cloak of wings, turning eventually to the stolid beat of heavy flight.’ Photograph: Mark Cocker In keeping with this region’s summer of torrid heat and drought, the field by the path was an expanse of burnt, dead thistles. What was totally unexpected were the 13 great egrets among it.
Country diary: A species brought to the edge of extinction, recovering in the fens
In keeping with this region’s summer of torrid heat and drought, the field by the path was an expanse of burnt, dead thistles. What was totally unexpected were the 13 great egrets among it. Ironically, the birds may well be here as a consequence of the climate crisis, but their appearance in a parched brown expanse felt strange. First, they are creatures of freshwater marsh and routinely hunt fish.
Country diary: On the bluest of days, the plaintive call of a pipit
The morning was sunlit and the sky the sort of deepest blue dome that makes your heart sing – and all the louder for being at the time of least natural sound. Autumn is the most silent season for birds, but at least I could hear the passing meadow pipits more clearly as they came out the blue in small numbers and crossed overhead on migration. There is something inherently melancholic about their plaintive piping calls, which seem at one with the mood of upland treeless places.
Country diary: On the bluest of days, the plaintive call of a pipit
A meadow pipit on Combs Moss. ‘They were once a default species on every moor.’ Photograph: Mark Cocker The morning was sunlit and the sky the sort of deepest blue dome that makes your heart sing – and all the louder for being at the time of least natural sound. Autumn is the most silent season for birds, but at least I could hear the passing meadow pipits more clearly as they came out the blue in small numbers and crossed overhead on migration.
Country diary: Goldfinches and grasses, together in an explosion of movement Original
Stands of tufted hair-grass, some over a metre tall, burned beige by the summer heat, were churned by strong autumn westerlies. Over and through the vegetation's swaying lather roved a flock of about 200 goldfinches, most of them this year's young. They were intent on the hanks of thistle and knapweed seed which lay below the hair-grass "canopy". These immature finches lack any of the red and black bands of the adult's head.
Country diary: A wasps’ nest in our shed is a work of art, a family saga Original
It was 9 June when I noticed a miniature paper "lampshade" hanging from the back beam of our shed. "Look at this wasps' nest," I shouted before realising that some of its creators were heading straight for me. We shut those doors and weren't been able to open them for 10 weeks. In that time, all we knew was that a sisterhood of wasps was trafficking every few seconds to the shed's rear wall. They then flew up into a slit giving access to the interior.
We must stop treating soil like dirt
The World Beneath Our Feet: The Hidden Life of Soil and Why it Matters to Us All Hodder Press, pp.288, 25 There is a delightful moment at the end of this book when Frank Ashwood is out looking for soil-dwelling invertebrates in his adopted New Zealand home. Suddenly he proclaims: ‘I notice something and my heart skips a beat. A velvet worm.’ He goes on to tell us that the discovery of two of these rare organisms in one day is ‘a thing of dreams’.
Country diary: Waiting for a nightjar is elusive and maddening – then thrilling
The setting sun spread a last Iberian glow over the hills opposite before they were drained of colour and sound, and by nine, the world was in monochrome. In line with national increases in their numbers and range, nightjars have prospered here recently. It seems especially so with the clearance of conifers, which has left a mix of old Scots pine and open space perfectly suited to this crepuscular ground-nesting migrant. You hear nightjars much more than see them.
Country diary: Martha, a tribute to Buxton's miners, has been knocked off her plinth. Why?
Our town is blessed to have the Buxton Civic Association, a charity devoted to the built and natural environment. It owns and manages, for wildlife and people, almost all our important woods, including Grin Low, which was a historically important area for lime‑burning. To celebrate that industry, the civic society commissioned wooden sculptures – Charlie, then Martha – to highlight the important work done by miners in uplifting the fertility of Derbyshire's farmland.
Country diary: I’m immersed in the rich, chromatic aura of a summer meadow
Tue, 21 July 2026 at 4:30 am UTC Oxeye daisies and grasses in late evening light.Photograph: Mark Cocker In his glorious poem Haymaking, about a flower meadow, Edward Thomas describes how the fiery day “had a kernel sweet of cold” and “the white empty road was lightly strewn/With leaves”. The heat here, however, was unrelieved, and if the road was empty, it was also liquefying at its margin.
The return of wood warblers here is bittersweet
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Country diary: The return of wood warblers here is bittersweet
Tue, 7 July 2026 at 4:30 am UTC A wood warbler in its characteristic song posture.Photograph: Mark Cocker The wood warbler is one of my signature birds, a highlight of schooldays when a pair bred annually in Lightwood five minutes from my house. They were also widespread at other local sites and while we took them in our stride, they were always special too.
Country diary: A revelation among the ‘clints and grikes’ of my limestone seat
The ‘clints and grikes’ of limestone pavement repurposed as nature's raised beds. Photograph: Mark Cocker Grass Wood is a magnificent fragment of ancient woodland owned and exceptionally well managed by the Yorkshire Wildlife Trust. It is home to some lovely plants including lily of the valley and herb paris. What became my defining revelation about the place and, in truth, about this whole area was down to a wood warbler.
Country diary: A revelation among the ‘clints and grikes’ of my limestone seat Original
Grass Wood is a magnificent fragment of ancient woodland owned and exceptionally well managed by the Yorkshire Wildlife Trust. It is home to some lovely plants including lily of the valley and herb paris. What became my defining revelation about the place and, in truth, about this whole area was down to a wood warbler.
Symbol of wisdom or harbinger of death – the owl preserves its mystery
Ghosts of the Night: The Extraordinary Lives of British Owls William Collins, pp.256, 20 As the author of this engaging book makes plain, it is with good reason that owls are such cherished birds. They possess the most acute sense of hearing not just of any avian group but possibly of any creature. In experimental conditions of total darkness, barn owls were able to catch mice merely by hearing their rustling as they moved.
Why are orchids so mysterious and coveted? It all starts underground
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Country diary: Why are orchids so mysterious and coveted? It all starts underground
Tue, 2 June 2026 at 4:30 am UTC A spotted orchid plant.Photograph: Mark Cocker When we moved to this house, we didn’t need the encouragement of No Mow May – the ecological campaign advocating restraint in the garden. Our old lawnmower was designed to tackle your average handkerchief and leaving nine-tenths of the new place uncut was a matter of necessity as much as self-control. The highlight of last year’s non-labouring efforts addressed directly the whole meaning of no-mow gardening.
Country diary: A truly golden spring for buttercups and dandelions
This spring has specialised in very specific kinds of abundance. In February it was snowdrops in extraordinary numbers, but last month it was dandelions. My most exulted sighting came as I drove out of upper Dovedale when, from the corner of my eye, I caught a blanket of gold running over the slope. The flowers held the foreground before the eye travelled onwards to Sheen Hill in Staffordshire. We overuse the word “carpet”, but in this instance it was appropriate.
Country diary: Newts in the pond, commotion in the house
Mark Cocker Tue, May 5, 2026 at 4:30 a.m. UTC 2 min read Add Yahoo as a preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. Palmate newts in Mark Cocker's pond.Photograph: Mark Cocker (Photograph: Mark Cocker) It has been a source of excitement for weeks that we have found ourselves custodians of newts. Judging by the numbers present and the age of our pond, they have probably been here at least a decade. Yet neither our neighbours nor our predecessors at the address knew of any.
Country diary: The most magical of frost-coated mornings
A ring ouzel. ‘Every feather on the undersides of the one male I saw seemed rimed with frost.’Photograph: Mark Cocker As I drove to this tiny moorland hamlet, the dawn sky looked so grey that I imagined it must have 100% cloud cover. Actually, there was none, and as the blue slowly crept in overhead, I could see that frost was everywhere. I also realised that there was no breeze and every sound seemed distilled, so I stopped by the first farm to record my blackbird.
Country diary: A bum note amid the dawn chorus
A robin singing at dawn. Photograph: Mark Cocker Our old Buxton tip might bear the scars of former abuse, but it’s now an entangled, self-willed wood, largely made up of willows and birch, which is surrounded by flowers in summer and has a species list of 870, composed mainly of insects. The diversity arises because these two pioneer trees are among the most invertebrate-friendly in our islands.
Country diary: A wildflower display of astonishing richness
The Greek name for this southernmost tip of the Peloponnese is linked to a Byzantine fort at Cape Tigani (called Megali Maina), but it may well also draw on the region's desolate, mountainous rocky country that persists throughout the entire peninsula. The fierce Maniot people were well described by Patrick Leigh Fermor in his book Mani (1958), but the region has been more recently celebrated in Charles Foster's brilliant The Edges of the World, published in January.
Country diary: A wildflower display of astonishing richness
An array of wildflowers including Chios chamomile and peacock anemone, in the Mani region of Greece.Photograph: Mark Cocker The Greek name for this southernmost tip of the Peloponnese is linked to a Byzantine fort at Cape Tigani (called Megali Maina), but it may well also draw on the region’s desolate, mountainous rocky country that persists throughout the entire peninsula.
Country diary: Our patch of snowdrops is part of the family
I wonder if nature has found a way to compensate us for the dreariest winter I can recall, because the snowdrops this year have been unbelievable. I'm seeing them everywhere – along road verges, on village greens, with vast white sheets across churchyards and especially in old gardens with driveways and mature trees around their margins. I have a small snowdrop patch under our crab apple and while they're modest in number, they are, in a way, more than flowers.
Country diary: Our patch of snowdrops is part of the family
Snowdrops in Mark Cocker's garden.Photograph: Mark Cocker I wonder if nature has found a way to compensate us for the dreariest winter I can recall, because the snowdrops this year have been unbelievable. I’m seeing them everywhere – along road verges, on village greens, with vast white sheets across churchyards and especially in old gardens with driveways and mature trees around their margins.
It’s extraordinary how much our orchards are founded on connection
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Country diary: It’s extraordinary how much our orchards are founded on connection
Pruning the orchard and harvesting the last of seven months' worth of fruit.Photograph: Mark Cocker As I prune one of our pears – a black Worcester, incidentally, a British variety from the 13th century – I ponder the linguistic connections that arise from our garden “acre” in a place called “Hogshaw”. The first word derives from Old English æcer, meaning an “acorn”. It was linked to wildwood, where the people would fatten their swine on wild pears, apples and oak mast.
Country diary: Succumbing to the serpent of shining green
A limestone wall smothered in bryophytes.Photograph: Mark Cocker The word bryophyte refers to a group of plants that may have colonised terrestrial Earth almost half a billion years ago. They need water to reproduce sexually and they love rain. So it’s hardly surprising that Britain is an important archipelago for them, with the two main groups, liverwort and mosses, represented by nearly 300 and 770 species respectively. This is a 20th of all the world’s bryophytes.
Will we ever stop predicting the end of civilisation?
Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity Particular Books, pp.336, 25 In the sphere of British environmentalism, Paul Kingsnorth is admired as a maverick in thought and deed. Starting out as a journalist with the Ecologist magazine, he co-founded the Dark Mountain Project, an online portal devoted to stories about the more-than-human world in a time of ecological collapse.
Country diary: Is the willow Britain’s finest tree? In one sense, it is
A willow thicket near Buxton, Derbyshire, fringed with frost.Photograph: Mark Cocker Usually in this country when we think about important trees, we focus on height, girth, age, visual impact – in short, their material properties. Few therefore would probably name willow as a number one British species. Willows often have no central trunk as in our archetypal tree model, and few specimens are more than 7 metres tall.
Global fish stocks have been perilous for decades – so why is still so little being done? | The Spectator Australia
Every Last Fish: What Fish Do For Us and What We Do To Them Granta, pp.320, 20 The great American activist Aldo Leopold once argued that to be a modern environmentalist was to suffer a world of wounds as you endured the losses inflicted on one cherished organism after another. No one, then, can suffer more anguish than the campaigner for the world’s fishes. In this wide-ranging, heartfelt, meticulously assembled account of our oceans Rose George shows why.
Country diary: Here for all to see - nature’s remarkable ability to rebound
Sheathed woodtuft mushrooms growing on one of the 22,000 trees planted at Mousley Bottom in the 1980s.Photograph: Mark Cocker Stand in this wood by the River Goyt, listening to the basso profundo of ravens overhead, and you could imagine that this place is some long-tempered blend of town and country. In one sense it is. High overhead to the east is the busy Albion Road bridge leading into New Mills town centre.
Country diary: Here’s the charm of the goldfinch - we want them to be near us
A goldfinch on a teasel.Photograph: Mark Cocker As I cleared our garden of dead vegetation, including many old teasels, I realised that the latter were still shedding seeds and luring goldfinches to them. Not wishing to deprive winter birds of food, or myself of opportunity, I planted the stalks in a single grove, and set up a mobile hide. Within minutes, a kind of magic unfolded.
Few do magnificence quite like the mandarin duck
A male mandarin duck. ‘The name of this hole-nesting waterfowl arose because the people bringing them back from China wanted to conjure both their exoticism as well as their elite status.’Photograph: Mark Cocker It’s funny to think that the 80 ducks present on this reservoir before me would have been unthinkable in my childhood. Even stranger is that we now get the birds on our garden pond.
Bats have suffered too long from the ‘Dracula effect’
The Genius Bat: Understanding Our Most Mysterious Mammal One World, pp.336, 20 Perhaps it is not surprising that bats, which sleep by day, feed by night and swoop through the darkness as erratically as moths, are among the least understood group of mammals. Yet one of the most poorly appreciated facts about them is their global success. They have a near universal presence across six continents and are amazingly diverse, with 1,500 species, representing almost a quarter of all mammals.
Country diary: What is the thrust of the song thrush song? It has to be joy
It was unmistakable: at dawn, through the bedroom window, a voice of declarative power and pure tones with a volume to rattle the glass. Did-uu … did-uu … did-uu, chwit, chwit chwit. It was a song thrush, and one of those rare occasions when I’ve heard one singing this side of Christmas. I’m tempted to add the “wrong” side, but we’ll come to that. The customary seasonal order for our three breeding thrushes starting to sing is mistle, then song, with blackbird a month later.
Country diary: What is the thrust of the song thrush song? It has to be joy
It was unmistakable: at dawn, through the bedroom window, a voice of declarative power and pure tones with a volume to rattle the glass. Did-uu … did-uu … did-uu, chwit, chwit chwit. It was a song thrush, and one of those rare occasions when I’ve heard one singing this side of Christmas. I’m tempted to add the “wrong” side, but we’ll come to that. The customary seasonal order for our three breeding thrushes starting to sing is mistle, then song, with blackbird a month later.
Country diary: Pearls of the ocean that might just return to British shores
It sits on my desk as I write, a memento from our Norfolk visit, where I found it at the tide's edge. This blue-and-ochre shell comprises 30 or more fine layers of wavy calcium, rising to a swollen weathered apex. You could imagine the original bivalve sitting in your palm as an intact and living whole. But for that thought experiment to be true, I'd have to be more than 100 years old. Because this European flat oyster is a relic of a lost Victorian ecosystem.
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