I’m a prematurely retired medical doctor, thanks to a stroke at 52. Good recovery means that though I can’t do my old job safely, I now have time to reconnect with the me of decades ago and pick up my love of animals and plants from where I left off to train in Medicine. Now I spend many happy hours looking after a domestic menagerie, volunteering in wildlife conservation, learning about horticulture, and simply nurturing our beautiful garden.

This is a random journal of animals, plants and landscapes in my life, snapped when I saw them, maybe with a story attached. They all have two things in common -they are interesting for any of many reasons; and I want to share them with you. This blog isn’t going to change the world and I haven’t got anything very profound or intellectual to expound. I just hope you can share the pleasure I get from seeing these little pockets of the natural world and perhaps it will help promote Conservation -which is increasingly important in our fragile world. Now that is rather profound!

Doctor “Dolittle” is in fact the correct spelling of the famous character’s name -all the variations of this are already taken on WP so I have taken the liberty of using a mis-spelling. I’m working on learning to talk with the animals.

I love taking photos and videos but make no pretence of being a skilled photographer or videographer. This is strictly amateur shooting. If you want to use one of my pics please drop me a line as a comment and I’ll get back to you. It would be nice to know where they are going. If you’re nice to me I’m very likely to say OK in exchange for a credit, and I might even forward you the high res file if you want -all the pics here have been compressed to save my storage space on WP.

I’ve lived only a few miles from Carlton Marshes for longer than I care to remember. Yet I had barely heard of it in all this time. It was an episode of seasonal winter depression and an increasingly suffocating sense of loss of purpose after the untimely end of my career that led me to it.

Watching TV one night in a dark, dismal January 2017 I saw an inspiring programme about Wildlife Trusts in Britain. My spirits lifted as I felt a glimmer of a sense of belonging somewhere again. Researching the topic I discovered Suffolk Wildlife Trust (SWT), and then all of its reserves. Carlton Marshes was virtually on my doorstep!

Soon I was meeting the Head Warden, Matt, and after mutual approval I signed up as a volunteer with SWT. Since that early part of the year I have gone on to get involved with several projects and several more are in the pipeline. It’s given me a sense of belonging to something much bigger than me, a way to put something back into the world. The science -biology and botany- and educational opportunities are welcome brain food, and the fresh air and exercise a tonic for an often tired body.

Carlton has become a really important place to me, and this is where my new journey has begun.

Please feel free to wander around. You can browse by category in the menu bar (where posts read in chronological order), or from a list of individual posts (last item in the menu), or by month from the list on the right. Feel free also to add a comment at the bottom of this page, or share on social media (below) or follow (on the right of each page on a PC or at the bottom on a phone) if you want to be notified of each new post. I’d be very pleased if you visited again.

I’m starting this blog with no clear idea of where it will end up. But then the journey is always so much more interesting than the destination…..