200 up.

No, not my life list, but the number of posts I've put up so far this year. A lot of it is drivel but the odd one has touched a nerve. Yesterday's post on patch birders is still running - it's worth reading the comments so far added.

Apologies for the lack of photographs recently - I hope to put that right very soon.

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"Kwowww"

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Mike Netherwood

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I first met Mike Netherwood at Beddington Sewage Farm in early 1975, me being an ultra-keen and ultra-green 16-year old birder, he some 20 years my senior. Mike, together with Ken Parsley, were the remnants of a once much larger ringing group which carried out the trapping and ringing of birds across the open expanse of the sewage farm. Whenever I bumped into them, which I often did, they would both tolerate my many questions about what they had seen and trapped and listen to me waxing lyrical about my own observations. Over the coming months they showed me how they caught the birds, allowed me to witness the ringing and measuring of them and, if I were very lucky, allow me to help them out by holding mist-net poles, carrying bird bags or writing down (scribing) the data that they were collecting into notebooks. By the summer of 1976 I had joined them, proudly in possession of my trainee ringer's permit. For the next three years (until I 'defected' to Dungeness) I spent man
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To tell it like it is, or not...

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