NORTH DOWNS & BEYOND

Short days, crap weather, SAD - the winter months can be a right pain in the whatsit. If you're into grilling gulls and scoping through rafts of wildfowl then you're quids in, but if you hanker after butterflies and copious flower then I'm afraid it can all get a little bit difficult. As an antidote to cold fingers and commuting in the dark (although I've given that miserable aspect of travel up) please accept a bit of nostalgia from this summer, all the way from Crete and the Aegean Sea. Back in June we visited Elounda and, together with brother-in-law Bill, discovered this wonderful footpath that ran from the shores of the Kalydon peninsula up onto the top of a hill range. Here we found an abandoned settlement that stretched for miles along the tops. We later found out that generations of Cretans had used these settlements during the summer months to seasonally tend to livestock and crops. It is an atmospheric place and we both fell in love with it. We original...

I'm sure that most of us have gone on a 'family' holiday and made the decision that, although there will be birding potential, it is best not to show any intent to act upon it. The binoculars, of course, still come along for the trip - just in case we might find ourselves near to a bit of decent habitat - but the scope will be left behind, as that would be a dead give-away of our true intentions! This is how I treated our recent holiday to Crete, although I'm sure that I fooled nobody. I'm not the most widely travelled world birder, but have seen a good cross-section of what Southern Europe has to offer, and there was just Lammergeier and Italian Sparrow present on the island that I had yet to see elsewhere. We were staying at the fairly small coastal resort of Elounda in the north-east, nestled underneath a range of imposing hills. I spent a good couple of hours each day mooching about the surrounding countryside, wandering no further away than 3km. I got...