NORTH DOWNS & BEYOND

A bit of a miscellany today. The Bard of Littlestone came up with a few 'birding revolutionaries' which included: Goosey Goosey Ghandi Martin Luther Kingfisher Kamal Attaturkey Napoleon Bonaparte's Gull Oceanodroma Castro Not to be outdone, I joined forces with him to compile this list of 'birding rogues': Josef Starling Vlad the Impala (OK, it's a mammal) Redpoll Pot Jack Snipe the Ripper Pitta Sutcliffe House Martin Bormann Heermann's Gull Goering Today I am mostly disliking the use of the word 'math' (as in 'Do the math') I had a dream last night that the Next Generation Birders had been outlawed and were rebranded as 'The Birding Youth' , were then nicknamed 'Green Shirts' and started burning the notebooks of known rarity supressors. I'm in need of a holiday...

When I was compiling the content of my last post I became quite nostalgic.But nostalgic for what? Long hair and spots? Flared denim and broken-down cars on twitches? Crap optics and hard-to-get birding information? The more I thought about it other things started to take on a gild of gold - three-day weeks, power-cuts, flair footballers, terrace violence, punk rock... not all of these things are good things, I needn't point out, but THEY WERE OF MY TIME. And there is the truth. I entered the 1970s just turned eleven years old and left them as an (almost) independent adult. These were my fomative years, when life was meant (and did) take me by the scruff of the neck and show me the good, the bad and the ugly that it had to offer. Birding got caught up in all that and so became as much a defining influence as my first experience of everything else that came along. I cannot extract my birdwatching experiences from the music, sport, politics and socialising at that time because they we...

When it comes to my natural history studies I cannot help but plan things which will have a start date of January 1st. Even if I come up with an idea for a project in mid-March, my tidy mind (OCD?) will want to wait until the beginning of the following year to implement it. I start to visualise a neatly produced report that encapsulates a set of observations made over a 12 month period (or 24, 36, 48 - neat and tidy, you see). Why not be able to initiate such things on September 14th? Or July 3rd? Or December 31st for that matter. I used to stop birding between Christmas and the New Year because I'd grown fed-up with the current years 'campaign' and restless to start the next one. Any time birding in this dead period was seen as wasteful, as if doing so was 'using up' energy. Yes I know, daft. I have a couple of ideas for new projects. Nothing grand, but things that have got me excited. My track record means that I will probably start one (or all) of them on Janua...