Given the disaster that was the rest of the summer, it's startling to remember now just how summery June 2010 was in much of Britain: warm, sunny and dry. During that month, I took a trip to the Elan Valley in mid-Wales, and had a very pleasant day out.

Here's a (not terribly brilliant) pic of a chaffinch in a picnic area hoping for crumbs, a very common sight -- unsurprising given that this is the second most common breeding bird in the UK (after the wood pigeon) with perhaps as many as six million breeding pairs.