The images, including battling birds and squabbling squirrels, showed just what could be found "under our noses", said Andrew Fusek Peters. "I wanted to celebrate the everyday stories and reveal the beauty of our birds, mammals and insects that live alongside us," the Shropshire photographer added. Hundreds of his images feature in a new book. The majority of the photographs were taken in his "modest" garden, and local village of Lydbury. "You don't have to travel to nature reserves or mountains," he said.

"I sometimes get snobbery from the big photographers who go to Africa and do the lions and tigers, or Greenland for the Polar bears," he explained. "And they think I'm somehow inferior because I do blue tits in the garden." But, he added, capturing rare images such as a hare feeding her leveret on someone's back lawn was "just amazing". "At the time I took it, that had been photographed maybe less than 10 times in the world," he said. "It was sheer gold on my memory card." He had also travelled to other parts of the UK in order to capture other "extraordinary moments," including a fox family playing in Clapham, south London, and a pair of red squirrels on the Isle of Wight. Mr Fusek Peters started concentrating on his own garden wildlife after a diagnosis of bowel cancer in 2018, perfecting a technique to "make time stop" to get shots of birds and butterflies taking off and in mid flight. Using his kitchen as a hide, he has also taken rare pictures of birds - showing the effect of diffraction on their wings, giving a rainbow effect.

"This winter I got a woodpecker and a nuthatch" he said, adding the images were "extraordinary". "Everyone's going to accuse me of using AI, but it's not - it's actually scientific." He added he was "one of the few in the world" to have taken such images. "I just seem to have this blessed luck when I concentrate on what's out of the kitchen window." (BBC)