NORTH DOWNS & BEYOND

Confession time. After 46 years of sending my natural history records into various societies and organisations, I'm getting fed up with it. Bored. Cannot be arsed. Sounds bad doesn't it? You would think that after playing the game for all of these years and doing the right thing that I would still be up for making sure that my valuable data would be sent to a safe place so that it can be added to the historical record and be used in years to come for research purposes or just entertainment value. I used to religiously send off my paper records to various recorders, and, when the records became computerised, started to visit BirdTrack to upload data, safe in the knowledge that it would get to the right person in good time. But recently there has been a change. A change in me. I am moving further away from my time in the field being somehow all tied up with harvesting data. It's now more personal to me than that. It isn't about number, or identification for that matter, a...

I've got an itch that I need to scratch. Something that is missing from my ornithological life. And that is getting involved with this 'nocturnal migration' malarkey. There are a band of brothers (and no doubt some sisters) who are sticking microphones out in their gardens overnight and recording the sounds of the night-time that would otherwise go undetected. It sounds like fun - it sounds like the sort of thing that I'd get involved in. I've investigated what is needed to get started, weighed up the pros and cons and... well, I haven't quite taken that final leap into the purchase of a recorder, a microphone, and the download of software - but we are getting near to that point. What's not to like, sifting through several hours worth of recording and separating the car alarms, aircraft and foxes from the calls of migrating waders, Coots and Common Scoters? I love nocturnal bird calls. I've spent an April night sitting on the moat at Dungeness and list...