Michelle Werrett

My book, Song of the Streams, is published by @MedlarPress this autumn – history, conservation and fly fishing on Exmoor streams. With photography by @robinbaker789 Thank you, thank you, thank you everyone who has helped this to happen. medlarpress.com/code/bookshop?…

I'm supposed to be working right now I have LOTS to do But A blackbird is making a nest in the hedge opposite me And emails just can't compete!

The headquarters is going to Utah. Every regional office is being shuttered. The research program is being destroyed. "Not a budget cut. Not a policy shift. Not a 'reorganization.' An execution." hatchmag.com/articles/trump…

C U R L E W 1/ Listening to a curlew calling from the valley floor this morning at sunrise. A bird that has declined by 80% since the 90s and is on course to be extinct as a breeding species in just 7 years. This thread is about the evidence from one Welsh valley. 🧵

George Pigeon, still laying hedges in his 80s. bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m0…

What a line-up! What a weekend! Thanks @Ptyj open.spotify.com/episode/2s6MJm…

@paulpowlesland @GlassJet 😅

The Environment Agency saying they are taking action to reduce illegal sewage spills is one of the funniest April Fools jokes I’ve seen today. They could have gone one better & announced a new policy that they will actually enforce the law & prosecute every illegal sewage spill on all our rivers & seas. But maybe that’s too ridiculous, even for an April Fools.

It’s that time of year - folks asking us about #bumblebees - WHY THEY’RE SEEING THEM ON THE GROUND - so here’s a thread to explain. Please #retweet! Every queen that survives means a new colony that gets to exist & produce queen #bees for next year! So important to #share! 1/9

@AnneLouiseAvery @Preservation945 ...'that gentle, country plant stood firm and strong and proud, a steward of a great weight of story.' Wonderful! 🌱

Around Easter-tide, if you were to ask one of the older residents of Old Fox's village to show you a palm tree, they would take you down to the quiet water meadows, midst the swans and the marsh marigolds, and point to the long-wanded sallow trees, with their velvet buds of creamy yellow and sea-mew grey and palest rose. "Here it be!" they would say, and, with their pocket-knife, cut four or five branches for your parlour, and a slip or two for your church hat or buttonhole. For in the old days in that little corner of Dorsetshire, Palm Sunday was known as Sallow or Sally Sunday, sometimes Willow Sunday, and in every church and household there were placed vases of pussy-willow from the river-bank and woods, and every congregant carried them and processed with them, and that gentle, country plant stood firm and strong and proud, a steward of a great weight of story, of the noble usherment of the king of the unnoticed, of the small and of the poor and of the powerless.

@Feargal_Sharkey @donnarainey4 Just awful.

"Salmon fishing banned from Hampshire’s River Test." The Environment Agency was established in 1995 with a specific legal obligation to "to maintain, improve and develop", "fisheries of salmon, trout, eels". And what's it achieved in the last 31 years? The entire UK population of Atlantic salmon is now on the endangered species list along with black rhinos, tigers and mountain gorillas while the number of salmon now returning to the River Test to spawn are deemed to be at "critically low levels". Hell of a job the boys, hell of a job. telegraph.co.uk/news/2026/03/1…

The wonderful day with George, hedgelaying in Devon was recorded for Radio four's Open Country - to be aired next Thursday at 3 @lovedevonhedges ' Robert Wolton is also featured talking about his hedge biodiversity findings Not to be missed hedge geeks bbc.co.uk/programmes/m00…

@FavColour_Green Well done, Pippin!

Pippin practicing his pleach He's 3. I wonder how long before he'll actually be laying hedges....?!

On Valentine’s Day 36 years ago, at the request of Carl Sagan, NASA turned Voyager 1's camera back toward home for one last look. From 3.7 billion miles away, it captured this: a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam. Here is how Carl Sagan beautifully described it: “Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it, everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor, and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every 'superstar,' every 'supreme leader,' every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there — on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam. The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand. It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.”

Puddle splendour!

Thoughts about dry times and rain …ellewerrettruralwriting.wordpress.com/2026/02/11/thi…

It was a bright and frosty Plough Monday and the air was sweet with birdsong. The farmers, old and bark-worn, young and bright-eyed, from every farm and gainery around the village and the hamlet had paid their visits to Old Fox's cottage. They bade Old Fox a solemn good morning & winked at Wolf, and left pouches of coins, cleaned in vinegar and polished to a dull shine, and generous withy baskets of green winter cheese and floury loaves and fruit cakes and marmalade and cider, so that Old Fox might open up the church that morning & keep the thin gold plough-lights burning to bless their ploughs and their horses and the furrows and the ridges of the long year ahead.

@clothofnature How lovely! Happy New Year, Jane x

A new year — a timeless miracle. Peacock butterflies, newly emerged from their Nettles Nursery, resting briefly before taking to the wider world. Metamorphosis reminds us that change happens in its own time — patient, tender, unseen. Here’s to small miracles and wild wonder.

@AnneLouiseAvery Happy New Year, Anne! 🥂

New Year, a whisker in, and Wolf was watching the storm from the calm comfort of the Drawing Room. Pine Marten had retired to bed, and Babcia and Old Fox were drinking brandy and talking about the Chelsea Arts Ball at the Albert Hall. Old Fox thought Ermine might have gone - "She helped to paint some of the scenery for the New Year party once, with Frank Brangwyn, I think." But Wolf wasn't listening, the outside was too exciting. For there, in the star-furrowed darkness, in the rural depths of Dorsetshire, the pass of years was a battle raging in the very air. Racing, harrowed clouds, the wind whewling in the trees, a low boom of muffled fireworks in the distance and the months and days and hours gathering ahead, like actors nervous and excited in a green room, as their stage is heaved into being.

@GethinJones123 Yay!

Ok, I’m easily impressed. I’m having fun pressing all the like hearts under every tweet that mentions Happy New Year so I can watch them explode like New Year fireworks. And you can now do the same thing with this tweet 👍

In these darkest days of winter, here is a story of midsummer written for @fallonsangler. A respite, a moment's escape. …ellewerrettruralwriting.wordpress.com/wp-content/upl…

@StuartHumphryes What lovely faces. I wonder what became of them all? Wonder whether he made it?

An Edardian Christmas in colour. I have cleaned-up this charming autochrome plate of three children showing off their Christmas toys about 115 year ago. It is original colour (not colourised)