An agreeable stagnation

I'm 21st in the pan-listers league table with 3332 species. That's me that is, dropping like a stone as each week progresses, watching the latest addition to the 'pan-family' go straight in above me. My last additions were Hairy Mock-orange and Bladder Senna on the 24th of June (that's almost a whole month ago!). Admittedly there has been a great deal going on in those four weeks, some pretty momentous stuff, and other stuff that has been time consuming, but still I have had the luxury of spare time in which to go out and look...

And I have looked. I've looked for butterflies. I've searched for plants. I've done a bit of birding, but none of it - none of it at all - has been driven by the need for lifers, the want for a tick, the scratching of an itch that only a brand spanking new observation will stop. My time in the field has been so laid back that I've been virtually horizontal. And I like it. I like it a lot. Whatever comes my way will do so and if I see it, if I nail the identification (or not) then all is well and good.

I see my fellow pan-listers posting, tweeting and commenting with such intensity it is difficult to keep up with them. Some of them seem to be in a different corner of the UK each day, regaling us with another long, juicy list of the rare and the obscure. I once would have been with them (or at least planning next weekend's field outing with targets in mind). At the moment I find all of that, if not pointless, certainly not fulfilling. To gobble up nature as a commodity to feed a constantly swelling number is not tickling my fancy right now. That others do so is nothing other than commendable - they are adding to knowledge, finding valuable data and mostly dealing in orders that have very few people studying them. It's all good stuff - just not stuff that I want to do at the moment.

The autumn is here - the waders are already moving, late summer plants like Harebells are in full flower, and the last of the year's butterfly species that emerge are about to do so. I'm looking forward to a bit of birding. Not necessarily rarity, but maybe a bit of visible migration, possibly a small fall. I don't need anything else at the moment. I'm in a strange place, best summed up as being the willing participant in an agreeable stagnation.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Goldfinches and Lavender

Image
We have three medium-sized Lavender bushes in our back garden. Throughout the summer the flowers (which last for several months) are a magnet for insects and give off a most restful aroma. As tempting as it is to cut the dead stems in the autumn, we always leave them, as we know that during the late winter we will get visitors to feed on the seed heads... This video was taken from the kitchen window this morning. We will normally see one or two birds over a few days, but have had up to 14 at once. We never tire of watching them. Lavender is a wonderful plant to have in the garden, with year round natural history benefits. So what are you waiting for? They are readily available at a garden centre close to you right now! There is an historic association with Lavender in this part of northern Surrey and south London. Lavender fields have been harvested for many years, with one particular field close to Woodmansterne being very popular with day trippers. A significant proportion o...
Read more

Welcome back!

Image
In November 2005 I purchased a pair of Swarovski 10x42 EL binoculars from The London Camera Exchange shop in Guildford, for the then princely sum of £899. These bins have served me well, with almost daily use in all types of weather, testing their durability to the maximum - salt water spray, deluges of rain, 38C temperatures, dust, dirt, slight knocks... and apart from the armour coating that had started to bubble and come away from the body, nothing to be alarmed about. Then, in the summer of 2022, I noticed that I had a problem when close focusing - the outer focusing wheel would lose grip and it would take me an age to regain a middle-ground distance of focus - plus, over the next few weeks this outer focusing wheel became loose. I resorted to the use of tape to keep it all in place, but realised that I had to do something about it in the long run. For a while I did consider buying a new pair - after all, they were then 17-years old - but they were still optically superb. It seemed...
Read more

A special day

In birding, timing can mean the difference between an average day in the field and that of a spectacular one. Good timing can be helped by reading the weather conditions correctly, or understanding local conditions but it is more often down to pure luck. In this case, I just got lucky... I had not visited Dungeness since March 2022, quite a gap for me. It was high time that I once more trod the shingle and my timing of a visit was down to several factors, mostly a personal liking for mid-late autumn but also because I needed to be at home until September 20th and could not make the journey south until then. I also chose to stay at the bird observatory for a few days rather than make it a day trip. All this conveniently found me stepping outside the observatory's back door in the breaking dawn of Sunday 22nd September, quickly making my way to the fishing boats, an area I prefer to stand to best appreciate any visible bird migration, an aspect of birding that I find exhilarating.  A...
Read more