Granddad's Camera: Wildlife

You're a budding nature photographer with your granddad's old film camera and an empty field journal. Badgers come out of the sett at dusk in spring. Puffins carry sand eels to their burrows on Skomer in June. Get the place, the season and the hour right, keep still, and the journal fills with your photographs and the real story of every species. REAL BRITISH WILDLIFE • 103 species: 66 birds, 22 mammals, butterflies and dragonflies, frogs, toads, newts, lizards and a basking shark • Each keeps to its real calendar and its time of day, and the rare ones really are rare • Every field journal page is checked against UK sources such as the RSPB, the BTO, The Mammal Society and The Wildlife Trusts, and lists them HOW A PHOTOGRAPH HAPPENS • Read the field signs, and ask the locals: everyone knows something • Creep closer or sit and wait, and mind the wind: deer, foxes and badgers smell you from upwind • Frame it, press the shutter as the focus marker crosses the green, and see how it came out once Lens & Lark have developed the film • The first time you meet a species it's a dark shape and a field sign. Name it, and you'll know how to approach it ALWAYS A REASON TO GO BACK OUT • Bird News: 12 rare visitors that turn up for a day or two. When it pings, go • A wildlife garden at Granddad's: feeders, nest boxes, a pond, a hedgehog highway, a camera in the tit box and a moth trap with 24 moths in their real flight seasons • Field & Fen Monthly: a photo competition every month, and a Hall of Fame to climb • A new challenge from Sarah every real day • Bronze, silver and gold stamps for every place, 20 rare colour forms and named local animals, and five conservation stories FIVE PLACES, ONE RAILCARD Start in Millbrook, a market town with gardens, a park, a canal and farmland. Then take the train to the New Forest, the Norfolk Broads, the Pembrokeshire coast and Skomer, and the Cairngorms. Each ranger's stamp opens a second place nearby: Hatchet Pond, Strumpshaw Fen, Strumble Head and Glenmore. FREE TO START Millbrook is the whole free game: the garden, the moth trap, the competition, the barn story and Sarah's daily challenge. Photograph five species there and Sarah offers you a railcard. Taking it is one purchase that opens the rest of Britain, yours for good. No adverts, no subscription and no account, it collects no data, and it plays offline. GOOD FIELDCRAFT Protected birds can't be approached in the breeding season, some animals are only watched from a hide or by red-light torch, and if you rush an animal, it leaves. Made by OakFox, a small studio in the UK.