SADLY this is my last Nature Watch column due to my age and increasing inability to cover any distance for photographs. I am going to let readers know how my interest in nature began many years ago.

I was born near Landrake in 1940, back in the days before television and the invention of hand-held electronic time wasting machines so, virtually all my school mates, girls as well as boys, were interested in nature and collected frogspawn and wild birds eggs in the spring. Thankfully it is now against the law to take birds’ eggs from their nests, but the visiting to ponds for spawn collecting has long been forgotten. It seems that children no longer have that desire to explore and learn about nature.

Mind you, we were lucky that one of our school teachers, Mr Scales, also loved nature and once a week during the summer he would take the whole class, probably thirty five of us, up a narrow lane opposite the school. We would then go down across a couple of fields to the River Lynher where we would study nature for a couple of hours.

I was one of six children and we spent evenings and weekends walking the fields and woods around our home. We collected blackberries for our mother to make jam with and in the autumn, it would be hazel nuts and mushrooms. Back then nearly all grass meadows would offer us loads of field mushrooms that were on the menu for tea, almost every day. Hazel nuts were stored in a small hessian sack then hung from a ceiling beam in the kitchen until we ate them as a treat during Christmas.

I don’t think any of today’s school children have ever searched for and found a blackbirds nest with eggs in, or have watched a dragonfly emerge from the body of its larvae on the banks of a pond.

A pond, where they could watch a Canada goose with its family of goslings. Do parents not care about their children not knowing about nature or are they content to let them amuse themselves on their mobile phones?

They could walk along any country road and see how a spider captures its food.

During this time of the year they might see a group of the red with white spots, fly agaric mushrooms, that were once a common feature in children’s books that contained stories of fairies and elves.

Before I retired, I spent over forty years working for a builder working in different places around east Cornwall. During my half-hour lunch break, I would spend ten minutes eating and drinking and twenty minutes walking around the site with my camera taking photos of flowers and any small animals that I saw.

I started contributing sport and news pictures that I took during evenings and weekends in 1969 and then I thought it would be a good idea to share my nature pictures with Cornish Times readers. So in 1991 our favourite weekly paper began to occasionally use pictures, in groups of four or five with up to a thousand words, under the title Country Diary.

Then in 1993 my contributions appeared weekly entitled Ray’s Rambles, causing younger brother, always one to criticise, to ask if this was a ramble in nature or a ramble in my mind! So even more of my time was spent out in the fields and woods.

Something I have always welcomed are messages from readers who either liked my column or, sometimes, pointing out things that I have written that they disagree with. Indeed, I once wrote a piece about rooks and crows and mentioned that an elderly farmers wife told me that she used to make rook pies. This prompted a Mrs Woodcock to send to the paper her mother’s recipe, written in the 1930s, for rook pie using four of these birds.

Since we moved to Quethiock, walking the narrow roads around the village has become an everyday occurrence and with a large garden we can watch many species of wild birds, hedgehogs and squirrels. In fact I spent so much time in the garden a visiting jackdaw that lived down by the church and had been tamed by a local family, would come and perch on my shoulder and try to remove my hearing aid. Obviously, we named him Jack.

When I walk around looking for pictures I carry my camera around my neck, switched on and ready to photograph anything interesting I see. This is how I managed to picture a fox as it turned to watch me walking past.

Once, down by the River Tiddy a heron flew past me and when I went to Saltash, where we always go down to the café beside the Tamar, I spotted what looked like a domestic goose that thought it was a swan.

When we visit Trago Mills, I always take a walk up into the woods beside the Fowey. Looking down at the river I spotted a dipper with a freshly caught fish in its mouth. If I went there specifically to photograph this white chested bird, I would probably have to spend the whole day there with little chance of being lucky.

Very occasionally we are visited by a great spotted woodpecker that will only stop for a few minutes, so I never managed to get a decent picture of it. But a couple of years ago we were watching football on the television, it was England versus France and right on half time I looked out to the bird feeders in the garden and there it was, eating peanuts. My camera was lying on the settee so I quickly picked it up and finally got a decent photo of him.

A long standing friend in Menheniot phoned one day and said he had a large, strange looking caterpillar on a garden shrub. I went over and he showed me an elephant hawk moth on a bush, right beside his front door. As I took its picture it looked right at me as if it to say; “No photos please”. I occasionally see these caterpillars, but again, going out just to find one would be a waste of time.

When I retired from my day job twenty years ago, taking these nature pictures for the Cornish Times made me walk around our towns and villages, rain or shine. I found out as soon as I finished work that it was no good just retiring and doing nothing, but reading and watching television became really boring. I think the end would come very quickly without my photography as it not only gave me an interest, but it has kept me fit.

And finally I would like to thank those numerous readers who have phoned, e-mailed or stopped me on my walks to thank me for my column or occasionally to grumble about what I had written. I will miss you all.