NORTH DOWNS & BEYOND

LEGACY: the long-lasting impact of your actions on others... I will soon reach a significant age, one that will allow me to claim a state pension and a free bus pass. Apart from greyer hair and a narrower band of hearing range it has also brought with it a certain amount of navel gazing: what did I do to get to where I am today, what have I done with that time and what - if anything - will I leave behind after I have gone? They are thoughts that are not unusual as we grow older. The answer to such questions are easier and more obvious if we have a family - any surviving partner, child or sibling will have their own memories of you that one hopes will be positive, that there will be some elements of your life that has informed them, touched them or even warned them off from replicating. Friends might be able to recall amusing anecdotes that you were involved in over a beer or a pot of tea. But as far as this post is concerned I am more interested in the afterlife of my natural history i...

I'm pretty sure that most of us measure our lives in blocks of time, based around the calendar year. I know I do. Always have done. There's something cathartic about December 31st giving way to January 1st, a cleansing of negatives which are now going to be turned into positives - at least, that is the hope. And this is no more true than when it comes to our natural history recording - think year lists, resolutions, plans - all that scheming and plotting that bouys us up during the dark nights of early winter. When I used to year list (some time way back when, before mobile phones and the internet) I would forgo an alcoholically infused New Year's Eve to ensure that I was out of the door, pre-dawn, on New Year's Day, ready to add species to the brand new notebook (always a brand new notebook), to start to populate that shiny new year's list. Madness really, rushing around celebrating each species even though I'd seen most of them 24-hours previously... What of n...

My plans were thrown into disarray on September 30th - I had hoped to stay on at Dungeness Bird Observatory well into mid-October, but a staff member fell ill with a nasty bout of Covid, so I thought it best to return home. As much as it was disappointing to miss out on more 'shingle time' it at least gave me the chance to do a bit of Uber-patch vis-migging, something that I am quite partial to. So, Colley Hill beckoned on October 3rd which happily coincided with a flock of seven Ring Ouzels that were inadvertently flushed from scarp-top scrub, with one female/imm staying behind to allow close, if partially hidden, observation. The nearby farm fields at Mogador were full of brassica, enticing at least 110 Skylark to linger within the crop. I returned to Colley Hill the following day ( 4th ) which was blessed with a mad 30-minute spell which saw two Great White Egret fly north, a Woodlark alight on the open sward before heading west and a single Hawfinch fly right past my head -...