I awoke this morning to BBC 4’s Today programme and Martha Kearney wading through her Surrey home garden pond with John Lewis-Stempel, the well-known and much respected Herefordshire nature writer. Stempel revelled in the depth, breadth and diversity of Martha’s well-established example of a healthy and vibrant good old English pond. When John talked enthusiastically of moorhens and described how a water boatman, the loudest creature on the planet, size for size, stridulates by rubbing its penis against its foreheads, he gained my full attention. I am never far from the many ponds of Wilden Marsh Nature Reserve, so I identified closely with Stempel’s watery subject this morning.

John Lewis-Stemple has written a book titled Still Water: The Deep Life of the Pond, and this evening I purchased a Kindle edition.

I have read most of John’s many nature books centred on and around his Herefordshire farm at the western end of the Black Mountains.

North Pond on Wilden Marsh Nature Reserve