Week in wildlife: a flying vole, a Wimbledon wagtail and some lovebugs
A vet bottle-feeds an orphaned brown bear cub at the Ovakorusu Celal Acar wildlife rescue and rehabilitation centre in Bursa, Turkey Photograph: Anadolu/Getty Images
Dinner for two … a rose chafer beetle shares a dahlia flower with a bee on a sunny afternoon at Greys Court in Henley-on-Thames, UK Photograph: Geoffrey Swaine/Shutterstock
On your marks, get set … ducks line up by the lake at the Luiz de Queiroz college of agriculture, University of São Paulo, Brazil Photograph: Zuma Press/Alamy Live News
Volunteers pour water over a tortoise rescued from a burned forest area in Buca, İzmir, Turkey. Almost 100 volunteers gathered to search for surviving animals, treat injuries and relocate them to safe habitats after recent wildfires Photograph: Anadolu/Getty Images
A snowy egret at Pacific Grove, California, US Photograph: Rory Merry/Zuma Press Wire/Shutterstock
A harlequin flying frog in Kubah national park, Sarawak, Borneo. The largest of these little amphibians are only 7cm long; their webbed feet help them to move around in the forest canopy Photograph: Mohd Rasfan/AFP/Getty Images
For the first time in 11 years, the Eurasian otter has been seen in Malaysia, here captured on a camera trap in Tangkulap forest reserve, Borneo. The species was thought to be extinct in Malaysia, and this reappearance is a hopeful sign for a healthy aquatic ecosystem in the area Photograph: Sabah Forestry Department/Sabah Wildlife Department/Panthera
A deer and her baby 'hide' in a cornfield in Neu-Anspach near Frankfurt, Germany Photograph: Michael Probst/AP
A family of elephants play during their daily bath in a river at the Pinnawala elephant orphanage, Sri Lanka Photograph: Ishara S Kodikara/AFP/Getty Images
Where the buffalo roam … a bison stops traffic in Yellowstone national park, Wyoming, US Photograph: Kaylee Greenlee/Reuters
A female beaver and her kit at the National Trust's Holnicote estate in Exmoor, UK. Five years ago the Trust began releasing beavers into two enclosures on the estate and working to restore the River Aller to how it would have been before human interference, with multiple channels and pools. There are more than a dozen beavers there now Photograph: Barry Edwards/PA
A wagtail catches up with the day's tennis action on the court at the Wimbledon Championships, London, UK Photograph: Tolga Akmen/EPA
A female Sri Lankan sloth bear wanders through Yala national park, Sri Lanka Photograph: Krishan Kariyawasam/NurPhoto/Shutterstock
A seagull flies with is catch over the Humber River in Toronto, Ontario, Canada Photograph: Anadolu/Getty Images
A white butterfly feeds on vibrant yellow wildflowers in Heyworth, Illinois, US Photograph: Alan Look/Zuma Press Wire/Shutterstock
Storks gather to find a resting place in the trees around Bursa, Turkey. To young to start a nest and a family, they are known as 'idle' storks and they spend most of the summer months looking for food Photograph: Anadolu/Getty Images
An American dog tick, also known as a wood tick, climbs through tall weeds while searching for a host in Oregon, US. This species is a carrier of diseases such as Rocky Mountain spotted fever and tularemia, though transmission is relatively rare in the Pacific north-west Photograph: Robin Loznak/Zuma Press Wire/Shutterstock
A wild goat wanders on the rocks in Tunceli, Turkey Photograph: Anadolu/Getty Images
Lovebugs crawl over a wooden post on the peak of Gyeyangsan mountain in Incheon, west of Seoul. Despite their name, the insects are considered to be pests, and their population has exploded in South Korea owing to a warming climate. Municipal officials in Seoul recorded 9,296 complaints about lovebugs last year Photograph: Anthony Wallace/AFP/Getty Images
Not ready for takeoff … a vole looks surprised as it is carried away in the talons of a white-tailed kite in Mountain View, California, US
Photograph: Sha Lu/SWNS
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If we have time to stream Netflix piffle, we have time to steam a pudding
In skittish mood during his tour of the Hebrides, Samuel Johnson devised a satirical meditation on a pudding in the style of a popular volume of religious homilies: 'Let us seriously reflect what a pudding is composed of.' The ingredients, he mused, are elemental: 'flour, that… once drank the dews of the morning; milk, pressed from the swelling udder by the gentle hand of the beauteous milk-maid… an egg, that miracle of nature'. And so on. Satire aside, puddings have been for centuries the foundation and ornament of our national culinary heritage. Even the French, swift to belittle the cuisine of these islands, are keen on them. 'Ah, what an excellent thing is an English pudding!' wrote François Maximilien Misson, visiting England in the 1690s. Several centuries later, Simon Hopkinson recalled with satisfaction an occasion when the Michelin rosette-laden chef Alain Ducasse dined at Bibendum, where he was so taken with Hopkinson's steamed ginger sponge pudding that he asked for the recipe. (A homely affair of breadcrumbs, flour, stem ginger, treacle and egg, the method is given in Hopkinson's recipe book, The Good Cook.) But have our historic puddings become an endangered species? A poll by YouGov for English Heritage finds melancholy evidence of popular decline, at least where homemade puddings (defined by the survey as a cooked sweet course, including pies and crumbles) are concerned. Two thirds of households in England, Scotland and Wales make a pudding once a month or less, while the remaining third never make one at all. By way of encouraging us to rediscover our traditional confections, English Heritage is offering a couple of pudding-inspired ice-cream flavours at its sites: sticky toffee, and apple crumble and custard. Ice cream now seems in danger of joining pizza toppings as a repository for random and essentially ill-advised flavour combinations: a summer pudding ice cream might have proved more appetising. Jane Grigson observed in her book English Food that puddings were 'some of the first victims of mass catering and manufacture'. Making them takes time (Hopkinson's ginger sponge needs to be steamed for two hours – about as long as it takes to watch My Oxford Year, the preposterous rom-com currently streaming on Netflix.) And time is the essential ingredient that many of us now lack. But there is also the question of the effort-to-enjoyment ratio. Hopkinson's ginger sponge is delectable, but some of the sturdier puddings belong to a less sedentary era. In Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey-Maturin novels, spotted dog, figgy dowdy and drowned baby are popular delicacies of Captain Jack Aubrey's wardroom. But Lobscouse and Spotted Dog, a recipe-book based on the food described in the novels, suggests that they might lie heavy on the insides of anyone not in the habit of running up the ratlines. The original purpose of many puddings, to provide as many calories as possible, as cheaply as possible, has now been overtaken by fast food. And the generations are dwindling for whom a steamed pud with custard was the nostalgic equivalent of Proust's madeleine. So perhaps the proper place for most puddings is a dignified retirement to volumes such as the forthcoming English Heritage Baking Book – to be revived, occasionally, by those of us with a yearning for a suet-based culinary hug with custard on top, and a two-hour film to watch.
