NORTH DOWNS & BEYOND

The Blogger analytics figures report that, as of this moment, ND&B has been visited 3,044,462 times. On July 26th alone 20,385 of you clicked on your mice - or pressed your screen - to see what was going on. Nonsense I know. How many of these visitors were genuine human beings? I'll never know. How many were in reality carried out by an automated software programme, also known as a bot? Plenty I'd wager. Good for stats if this blogging lark was purely a numbers game, which as far as I'm concerned it isn't. To be honest it's all beyond me... Anyway, for those of you who are human I thought I'd do a little round up of the back garden mothing news. Here in Surrey we are still without rain (getting on for 40 days now) and the daily maximum temperatures are above 30C more regularly than are underneath it. The grass is burnt caramel, vegetation wilting. There is no good news here really, although perversely if you are running a moth trap you try and find a silver...

When I began birding in the mid-1970s you could count the number of celebrity birders not on one hand but on one finger, and that finger belonged to Robert Dougal, a gentleman newsreader of advanced years who dressed soberly and conducted himself with impeccable manners - not the type of personality to became a role model for us young aspiring birders. And then, out of the celebrity-birder vacuum appeared a long-haired and bearded man who was one third of a cult TV comedy programme, who possessed street cred AND was a proper birder. His name was Bill Oddie. To be a schoolboy of a certain age in the early to mid-seventies meant that there were two big television highlights each week that were not to be missed. They were 'Monty Python's Flying Circus' and 'The Goodies'. Both were slightly subversive, off-the-wall and created by Oxbridge graduates that had turned comedy into not just an art form, not only full of social comment but infused it with an intelligence that ...

There has been much 'bigging up' and love shown for the Olympus TG7 camera recently, the reviewers raving about its macro facility and the fact that not only is it robust but it can also be used underwater. Although my current bridge camera is good for general photography (and is wonderful for birds at range) I must admit that it does not perform so well at the macro level. I recently spent some time in the field with Graeme Lyons who owns a TG7 and was blown away with the results that he got from such a modestly priced bit of kit - a tiny beetle that I could just about see revealed all kinds of form and pattern when its image was captured by the Olympus. Yesterday I purchased one. Early days and I've only just charged up the battery - however I hurriedly took a few sample images this morning and thought I'd share with you a couple of the results. One of the features of the macro (or microscope mode) is that you can set the camera to take a stack of shots of your flower...

Nostalgia. Is it a wimpish retreat into a bygone age, a celebration of what has gone before or just a plain old symptom of being a sentient human being who can look back as well as look forward? Maybe it is all three? I'm always mindful of Spike Milligan's take on the subject, an obsessive nostalgianarian (I may have just made up that word). He wrote something along the lines of - 'do we always look back in time because the present is troubling, the future is uncertain but the past is a known quantity' - some thing like that. I'm also drawn to the final line in F Scott Fitzgerald's novel 'The Great Gatsby' which is 'so we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past'. I wish I'd written that. Almost as good as 'I've seen things you people wouldn't believe' - I'll stop there before I go full flow into a response such as... "a quarter of a million hirundines fleeing the Kent coast and heading...

I've always liked to have plans, to have projects in the pipeline, a peg to hang my natural history sightings on, a reason behind why I do things even if those reasons are based more on a whim rather than scientific rationale. I also like to change things around a bit, hence my flitting between patches or swapping my core interests - normally birds, sometimes moths, there again it could be plants. Or trying to big up my Pan-species list. Itchy feet, a wandering mind, call it what you will but it is something that I have always suffered (or been blessed) with. And as the year starts to fade away (yes I know it is only July!) I like to prepare the ground for next year, that human construct of a time-line that some of us are slaves to. So, what has prompted my latest bout of 'thinking' - yes I can be accused of thinking now and again! Well, several things. First up is that need for me to hang my natural history sightings on a peg, to give a bit of reason and purpose to what I ...

For the inland moth trapper the chance of recording a scarce migrant moth is much higher than an inland birder recording a scarce migrant bird. I like to think of Vestals, Bordered Straws and Delicates as the lepidopteran equivalent of Yellow-browed Warblers, Red-backed Shrikes and Wrynecks - maybe not quite equals but I'm sure you get my drift. The latest heatwave has managed to send some more migrant moths to my modest inland garden in Surrey, with the first record of Ni Moth (pictured) plus two Small Mottled Willows - and on the back of two Striped Hawk-moths so far this year (plus a good few months of possible action to come) 2026 is turning out to be a decent year for continental wanderers. I have been recording the moths here in Banstead since 1987 and thought it a worthwhile exercise to tot up all of the migrant species that have come my way. I left out the much commoner species, such as noctuella, ferrugalis, and Silver Y, plus a few others that may have been pure migrants ...

I don't know how historians of the future will look back on the current period of time and how they will analyse it. What will they make of our species knowingly engineering an environmental breakdown, of the cover-ups, the denials, the greed? My fear is of a dystopian future, the obscenely rich and powerful living behind heavily protected barriers where new technologies and limitless money can stave-off the worst of the deprivations that the vast majority of the population suffer. I used to think that 'climate change' was going to be fed to us as a gradual process, the hotter summers, windier frontal systems and heavier rain incremental and slowly accepted. But not now. These life-threatening increases in temperature; the alarming melting of ice-caps, glaciers and permafrost; flash floods and landslides that are not generational events but are now annual ones - I haven't even mentioned crop failure, water insecurity and societal breakdown. There is no 'new normal...

I was having a dream that I was sitting in front of a giant aquarium, watching tropical fish swimming just inches away from my face. Without warning the glass exploded, engulfing me in freezing cold water and shards of glass. And at this violent moment I woke up, to be thoroughly confused as to what was happening as I was, in reality, being assaulted by cold water and broken glass - it was actually happening! Where on earth was I?... Jolted awake it took a few seconds to take in what was occurring. I was sitting in the front seat of Steve Broyd's car and his windscreen had been shattered by a Pheasant that had decided to fly straight at it as we travelled along the road at 50mph. My feeling of being immersed in cold water was, in fact, the cold winter air that was now howling into the opening car front. The glass was real. The Pheasant (a male) lay dead in the back of the car wedged between Bob and Scotty Hibbett. When the bird first entered the car Steve had looked around to see m...

As a family we have a great affection for the north Cornish coast and recently spent a week in the sleepy hamlet of West Pentire, east of Newquay. The area is well known for the wildflower fields that are under the stewardship of the National Trust, full of Common Poppies (largely over when we arrived), Corn Marigolds and other assorted arable plants. The image above gives some flavour as to the colour-scapes that such flowering can create. Corn Marigold is a fast disappearing species in my part of Surrey so it was a joy to see thousands of flowers in their pomp (below). Although not a holiday that had natural history as a central theme I did wander off on a number of occasions, taking advantage of the warm, sunny and settled weather plus the coastal footpath that takes you on a journey through some of the most stunning scenery the UK has to offer. I ventured as far as Perranporth on foot, via Polly Joke, Kelsey Head and the imposing sand dunes of both Holy Well and Perran. Considering...

From my folder marked 'Mystery Pictures' - best left to the experts... He may not have kicked over a hornet's nest exactly, but Seth Gibson's recent blog post on Pan-species Listing (PSL) ( you can read it here ) has certainly stirred up a bit of debate on social media (including a blog post from Alastair Forsyth which you can read here ). This is my contribution to the conversation. I think I can safely say that I was in at the start of the whole PSL movement. I had, just like Seth, independently started to collate a list of every living organism that I had recored in the UK and, just like Seth, this was primarily a lumping together of my bird, plant, butterfly, moth and dragonfly lists plus a handful of obvious others (ie Stag Beetle, Pike, Fox, you get the picture). My non-core identification library was scant and woefully inadequate, but it was all that I had to use - remember, these were pre-internet days! If I saw a wasp, fly, beetle or fungus, I took my basic ide...

Priest Hill. Until the Second World War it was north Surrey farmland, a mix of arable (wheat, barley, oats and potatoes) with a small herd of Jersey cows that were used for milking. A demand for the payment of death duties meant that the owners were forced to sell, which in 1942 brought in the tidy sum of £100,000 from Surrey and London County Councils. The farm was demolished in 1956 which then lead to the building of Ewell Technical College and the creation of playing fields for the use of Tulse Hill School, used to service its 2,000+ pupils, who were bussed in from South London. When Tulse Hill closed in 1990 the playing fields, changing rooms, tennis courts and cricket nets were abandoned to vandals, graffiti artists, fly tippers, travellers, glue sniffers, motor bike off-roaders... and me. I used to wander across the fast vegetating land, a vast open wasteland, to see what alien plants were springing up and what (few) birds I could find. A bit of the land was saved (Glyn Schoo...

The heading of this post may give you the false impression that I had some sort of connection with David Hockney - maybe that we shared studio space, or he was a drinking buddy - but no, we never met and he certainly had never heard of me, whereas I, of course, had heard of him. It would be virtually impossible to think of a list of the highly creative individuals that blessed the 1960s and not have him in their number: The Beatles, Twiggy, Terence Stamp, David Bailey, Mary Quant, David Hockney… they all slip off the tongue with ease and without so much as a need to think about it because they were all so iconic of that era - and continue to be so, so strong are their legacies. ‘A Bigger Splash’ and ‘Mr and Mrs Clark and Percy’ are just two of his paintings that will be familiar to many and just as redolent of the brightness and freedom of the 1960s as is ‘Sgt. Pepper’ and the mini-skirt. If I’m being honest, I’m not old enough to fully appreciate what was going on at this time - I can...

On the morning of 2 September 2006 I turned over the final egg box in the garden MV trap (here in Banstead, Surrey) to be surprised and delighted by a Striped Hawk-moth, a decent migrant record especially for a site so far inland. A once in a lifetime back garden capture - or so I thought. Fast forward to the morning of 2 June 2026, same site, same MV trap, with the same result - only this time a Striped Hawk-moth was the first species to be seen, hanging onto the cone of the trap. There are plenty of grizzled old moth trappers who will not record this in their gardens (even coastal ones) so I am understanding of my good fortune. They are smart, as can be seen from the images above and below. I had switched on the trap with a vague (oh alright, strong) hankering after an Eastern Bordered Straw, a species that has been almost invasive during late May and early June (I'd seen three at Dungeness recently). I still live in hope that the odd one may still be floating around. In the same...

Ever since I was a young lad I've liked to walk. Offers of a lift would be politely turned down - I wanted to walk. To see what was around me, whether that be a panoramic view, interesting architecture or getting a feel for an area. In later life it also included looking at the wildlife. When I go into London I'll shun the underground as there are parts of the capital that are hidden away from you unless you walk the pavements - lively side-streets, tucked away museums, discreet churches, fantastic pubs. When I was very ill (some 30 years ago now) I refused to lie down and used my walking as a way to keep fit both mentally and physically. And now that I am well advanced in years I use walking as a way of oiling my joints, stretching my muscles and helping the grey matter to keep working. I do not take my ability to 'put in the steps' for granted and when I do it is an act of celebration and, if I'm being honest, a way of trying to keep ageing at bay. There is, I...