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News: recent updates, new pages and additional features

March 2024

A fully revised and enlarged 2nd edition of Sue Parker's Wildflowers in the Algarve - an introductory guide is now available in Kindle ebook format on Amazon...

February 2024

Over the winter we have been busy updating many of the 2,550 web pages on First Nature, adding more pictures and location/identification details. We have also created several new pages. Here is the latest: a tiny but stunningly beautiful fungus that we had never seen before, Colus hirudinosus...

December 2023

At last we have integrated the whole of the Algarve Wildlife website into First Nature, so now everything is together in a single website here at First Nature - a major cost saving (which we desperately needed) but also a significant time saver for people searching onlinefor information about the natural world. See the Wild Algarve section here...

November 2023

A fully revised and updated edition of Sue Parker's field guide Wild Orchids of the Algarve - how, when and where to find them is now available in Kindle ebook format on Amazon...

October 2023

A fully revised and updated edition of Sue Parkers field guide Wild Orchids of Wales - how, when and where to find them is now available in Kindle ebook format on Amazon...

July 2023

We are delighted to announce that Pat O'Reilly's Kindle e-book Anarchic Anthology of short stories is now available from Amazon.co.uk as well as Amazon.com for readers around the world. All author royalties go towards keeping the First Nature website free online for all and without adverts cluttering the pages and detracting from their readability. Proceeds from First Nature books help to support this initiative.

June 2023

New pictures and more details added to the Wild Orchids section of the website. Also yet more additions to the Butterflies pages, including some lovely pictures of the elusive Purple Emperor and Duke of Burgundy. Again, many thanks to our kind picture contributors, whose pictures are so often very much better than our own efforts.

April and May 2023

Some important addtions and updates to the Insects section, notably beautiful pictures of some of the rarer Brtish butterflies, the eggs, larvae and pupae, thanks mainly to contriibutions by Betty and Tony Rackham. It's great that we receive such valuable support to help keep First Nature up to date and always improving.

March 2023

Pure white forms of wild orchds are uncommon or in some cases very rare finds. We have now created a page with pictures of several of these enigmatic wildflowers that we have been able to find either in Britain or on mainland Europe. Here is a link to the page...

February 2023

This month we spent time adding new and or better pictures to several of the pages in the Wildflowers and Fungi sections. As always, we are most grateful to the kind people who contributed pictures to improve/extend the FIrst Nature website.

January 2023

Wishing a Happy New Year to all our visitors, kind contributors and most particularly our donors for their support, who have helped us to fund the hosting costs of keeping the First Nature resouces online for yet another year. (We started making our first wildlife and ecology web pages in 1995 - that's 28 years ago and still counting!)

2022 has been a tough battle in many ways, not helped by malicious hackers attacking our hosting server to insert advertisements for fake/duplicate watches and the like. If you ever see such material on First Nature, do please email us on enquiries @ first-nature . com (please take out the spaces in this address, which we have included in an attempt to avoid robot spammers.).

December 2022

Thanks to the superb pictures kindly contributed by Tomas Milan, we now have a web page for the very rare and beautiful Jubilee Waxcap, Gliophorus reginae. We are most grateful to Tomas and to all our generous contributors who help us fill important gaps on the First Nature website.

July 2022

The second novel in the Winding River Mysteries series is now available. All author royalties and publisher proceeds from Dead Drift and its sequence Dead Cert are being donated to support the environmental work of the Wild Trout Trust. Thanks to all who have already bought Dead Drift, which has received great acclaim. Dead Cert is now available online here...

May 2022

Our orchid survey on limestone plateaux in the Aveyron region of southern France has yielded some wonderful surprises, including Ophrys lutea, which we had not seen there in previous visits. We have also updated and improved many of our Wild Orchid pages...

April 2022

This spring has been an opportunity to update and improve many of our wildflower pages and to add several new ones. A 'star' worthy of mention is Pasqueflower...

February 2022

Our bookshop is closing down, and we are donating all future royalties from our books sales to environmental charities. The First Nature website will remain online and we will continue to add to and improve it for as long as we can afford the web hosting and internet costs; it will be funded by donations (including our own contributions, of course). Please help by making a donation...

November 2021

We are currently working to improve and extend First Nature's very popular Insects section, and the Butterflies, Dragonflies and Damselflies in particular. We are especially grateful to several very able photographers, who have contributed additional pictures for existing pages and enabled us to create several new pages. For example please see the new page for the Ruddy Darter dragonfly...

June 2021

This website is updated far more frequently than its News page! Over the past year we have added many new pages to our Fungi, Insects, Birds and Wildflowers sections in particular. We have also added a Donations facility so that people can help us to keep these 2200 wildlife and ecology pages online and we can continue donating our book royalties and other publishing income to environmental charities - Pantlife, the Wild Trout Trust, and charitable botanic gardens in Britain and overseas. We are most grateful to those who help in this way.

June 2020

Locked down but far from locked in, we have been enjoying the wildlife and wildflowers of or own garden in West Wales. The centrepiece, both for us and for wildlife, is our 5 x 3 metre pond, which contains no fish and so is a haven for dragonflies, damselflies and many other fascinating insects as well as newts, frogs and toads. Over the years we have created and managed many wildlife ponds, both small and large, and we have also helped friends to construct new ponds in their gardens. Our illustrated "Build a Garden Pond" page is now online with detailed design, planning, materials and construction guidance. There is also advice on a range of beautiful native wildflowers ideally suited to planting either in and around the margins of small garden ponds.

October 2019

This month we have added several new species pages to our Fungi section - for example see Hygrocybe citrinovirens...

At this time of year, when we sometimes receive more than 10,000 visits in a single day, the First Nature website inevitably gets a lot of enquiries. We always respond, and usually within a few hours. We are much more likely to be able to help with identification of species when enquirers follow our picture submission guidelines...

September 2019

Lots of new pages in our Waxcap fungi section plus updates and new pictures on many more. See also our new page on Smoky Spindles...

August 2019

This month we added picture galleries for several more wildflower families. The majority of our 700 featured wildflower species are now viewable via such picture galleries, which we hope will make the identification process quicker and easier.

July 2019

All through spring and early summer we have been adding new pictures and updating text on our wildflowers section...

Feruary 2019

Over the winter we have updated our Wild Orchids Gallery to include many more species as well as a fascinating selection of hybrids and monstrous forms.

September 2018

Over the past three months many new species pages have been added to the Fungi section of the site including some very rare fnds such as Cystolepiota pulverulenta and Galerina heimansii.

June 2018

There are several new pages plus updates and larger pictures in our Insects -> Lepidoptera section (Butterflies and Moths).

February 2018

We have now made the entire website secure, using what is known as SSL (Secure Socket Layer) encryption. Behind this jargon is technology that prevents other people from seeing any of the information that passes between your computer and the First Nature website. The only difference you will see is a padlock symbol of security displayed in the address bar of your browser,m and page URLs are prefixed by https:// instead of just http:// and so, although our book ordering pages always were (and still are) provided via the PayPal secure server, this added layer of security provides further reassurance to our visitors..

November 2017

We now have a new Hoverflies picture gallery, thanks to superb photographs kindly contributed by David Adamson. We hope to add more species to the gallery before too long.

September 2017

Several new fungi species have been added to the site, with detailed descriptions and pictures, including micros of spores and other microscopic characters that help (and in some instances are crucial) with identification.

August 2017

Loads of updates to fungi pages this month, plus a few new pictures added to our Wildflowers section.

July 2017

Always a busy time of the year, visiting nature reserves to photograph wildflowers, butterfies and whatever else catches our eye, but we did find time to put bigger and better pictures on many of the Wildflowers pages. Some great fungi finds have resulted in new pages too, including two deadly poisonous species, Lepiota subincarnata and Lepiota brunneoincarnata.

June 2017

We have had to remove the Fungi Blog section from the website, because hackers repeatedly introduced content linking to other websites (and no doubt charged 'clients' for the 'service'). Apologies to those who enjoyed the occasional updates to our blog. We will concentrate on providing the best content we can on our main site.

May 2017

A busy month updating pages in the Wild Orchids section and other wildflower pages...

April 2017

Spring fungi species may be fewer in number than we see later in the year, but some really important finds are being made, and we have been updating pages with larger pictures and more detailed identification guides. See, for example, one of the most sought after edible mushrooms of springtime, Morchella esculenta, the (not always so very) Common Morel...

February 2017

Our trip to Los Roques, Venezuela, was a great adventure. As well as flyfising for (and catching!) Bonefish, we encountered many other fish species and took time out to study and photograph some of the wildlife of this beautiful coral reef archipellago, which is designated as a National Park. Details...

January 2017

Installing larger pictures on the Fungi and Wildflowers pages has taken up most of our spare time this month, but there are also several new fungi species pages including the very rare Cystoderma simulatum...

July 2016

Fungi fanciers will be pleased to hear that at last we have created web pages for the Oilslick Brittlegill, Russula ionochlora and the Flat Oysterling Crepidotus applanatus. Other improvements include a few more fungi nomenclature updates, which are now nearing completion.

Website improvements this month have included major revisions at genus level involving scientific name changes (mainly resulting from DNA analysis) of the waxcaps and boletes. A few other groups are also affected but we are nearing completion of this work, maintaining First Nature as an up-to-date, comprehensive source of taxonomic and etymological information as in addition to it predominant position as a clearly-structured and readily accessible, highly-illustrated source of fungi identification guidance.

February 2016

Throughout the winter we have been busy updateing our Wild Orchids pages and adding many new species to our Fungi section...

December 2015

We have been adding several dozen new pages to our Fungi section, and we are delighted that several thousand people per day hav ebeen visiting this section of the First Nature website during autumn 2015.

September 2015

Although we no longer run flyfishing courses, we have extended and added several new venues to the Great Fishing Venues in the USA...

August 2015

Several new (to us) and rare fungi species now have pages on this site including Ganoderma carnosum and Cantharellus amethysteus.

June 2015

It's a great relief to be back at something more creative than changing page scripts to complete the conversion of 2000 pages to be 'mobile-friendly'. We think all is well, but please please do let us know if you spot pages that don't work properly on either desktop computers, tablets or smart phones. We would very much appreciate an email from you...

April 2015

Please bear with us... we are converting our web pages to 'mobile first' so that they are easily accessible on either desktop/laptop computers, tablets such as iPad, Kindle etc, and smartphones too. It will take a few weeks to complete all the updates.

February 2015

Hazel Gloves fungus now has a page on First Nature. Learn about this rare and very beautiful ascomycete species, Hypocreopsis rhododendri...

These occasional news updates are written by Pat and Sue at First Nature

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