NORTH DOWNS & BEYOND

The project came about when I was considering a day trip to Wiltshire to try and find some elusive day-flying moths. My intended targets included The Forester and Scarce Forester. I had already recorded Cistus Forester, but those other two species had defied several attempts to see them. They differ little in appearance and identification is down to minuscule size-differences and the tip of the antennae. The more I thought about it the more ridiculous it seemed to me that I was considering a 200-mile round trip to try and find almost identical moths to one that I had seen before. Admittedly, there would have been more to such a trip than Forester moths, but it got me thinking. I do like a project, something to hang my observations on, to give my time in the field some sort of added meaning beyond just random enjoyment. In light of many things - climate change, low-carbon footprint, biodiversity collapse - I am increasingly questioning what I do and how I do it, particularly how I condu...

A new month, a new challenge. As I am still not comfortable with travelling far from home, and prefer to travel on foot, I looked at the Ordnance Survey maps last night to identify a 2km square which would act as the focus of my natural history efforts for the month of June. Our house is bang on the southern edge of TQ2261, and within this 2km square can be found Priest and Howell Hills, both SWT reserves and good for plants and butterflies, if not so much birds. Given that spring is almost over, and my attention does tend to switch away from ornithology for the summer months, this seemed like a good square to bash, particularly as the farmland close to Howell Hill has been allowed to run wild in places, and so holds the potential for some surprising plants to pop up. After a morning of painting the garden fence, I walked from home and first of all checked the farm paddocks attached to NESCOT, as a flock of Starlings has been building here - after all, a few Rose-coloured versions...

Over the weekend I paid a brief visit to Banstead Downs. The amount of flower on show was terrific - locally we seem to be experiencing a great flowering at the moment, at least on our precious chalk downland. The most eye-catching was this Kidney Vetch, which will be good news for the Small Blue colony, as this is their food plant. There was plenty of Fairy Flax, Bird's-foot Trefoil and Dropwort also on show. The only slight downer was that the patch of Basil-Thyme (very local in Surrey) is much smaller this year. It seems to be getting crowded out by coarse grasses.