NORTH DOWNS & BEYOND

LEGACY: the long-lasting impact of your actions on others... I will soon reach a significant age, one that will allow me to claim a state pension and a free bus pass. Apart from greyer hair and a narrower band of hearing range it has also brought with it a certain amount of navel gazing: what did I do to get to where I am today, what have I done with that time and what - if anything - will I leave behind after I have gone? They are thoughts that are not unusual as we grow older. The answer to such questions are easier and more obvious if we have a family - any surviving partner, child or sibling will have their own memories of you that one hopes will be positive, that there will be some elements of your life that has informed them, touched them or even warned them off from replicating. Friends might be able to recall amusing anecdotes that you were involved in over a beer or a pot of tea. But as far as this post is concerned I am more interested in the afterlife of my natural history i...

I'm pretty sure that most of us measure our lives in blocks of time, based around the calendar year. I know I do. Always have done. There's something cathartic about December 31st giving way to January 1st, a cleansing of negatives which are now going to be turned into positives - at least, that is the hope. And this is no more true than when it comes to our natural history recording - think year lists, resolutions, plans - all that scheming and plotting that bouys us up during the dark nights of early winter. When I used to year list (some time way back when, before mobile phones and the internet) I would forgo an alcoholically infused New Year's Eve to ensure that I was out of the door, pre-dawn, on New Year's Day, ready to add species to the brand new notebook (always a brand new notebook), to start to populate that shiny new year's list. Madness really, rushing around celebrating each species even though I'd seen most of them 24-hours previously... What of n...

My plans were thrown into disarray on September 30th - I had hoped to stay on at Dungeness Bird Observatory well into mid-October, but a staff member fell ill with a nasty bout of Covid, so I thought it best to return home. As much as it was disappointing to miss out on more 'shingle time' it at least gave me the chance to do a bit of Uber-patch vis-migging, something that I am quite partial to. So, Colley Hill beckoned on October 3rd which happily coincided with a flock of seven Ring Ouzels that were inadvertently flushed from scarp-top scrub, with one female/imm staying behind to allow close, if partially hidden, observation. The nearby farm fields at Mogador were full of brassica, enticing at least 110 Skylark to linger within the crop. I returned to Colley Hill the following day ( 4th ) which was blessed with a mad 30-minute spell which saw two Great White Egret fly north, a Woodlark alight on the open sward before heading west and a single Hawfinch fly right past my head -...

In birding, timing can mean the difference between an average day in the field and that of a spectacular one. Good timing can be helped by reading the weather conditions correctly, or understanding local conditions but it is more often down to pure luck. In this case, I just got lucky... I had not visited Dungeness since March 2022, quite a gap for me. It was high time that I once more trod the shingle and my timing of a visit was down to several factors, mostly a personal liking for mid-late autumn but also because I needed to be at home until September 20th and could not make the journey south until then. I also chose to stay at the bird observatory for a few days rather than make it a day trip. All this conveniently found me stepping outside the observatory's back door in the breaking dawn of Sunday 22nd September, quickly making my way to the fishing boats, an area I prefer to stand to best appreciate any visible bird migration, an aspect of birding that I find exhilarating.  A...

Phasing. A good word that, used quite a bit in the counter-culture that was 1970s twitching. If somebody had phased they had given up going for rare birds.  "Dave didn't go for the 'legs or the Bobolink, he's phased" This was said in hushed tones, as if Dave had recently departed this life. To phase was to exit stage right (or left), to cease to be a player, to be consigned to the rank of 'dude' - another good 1970s twitching word. Now, my question to myself is 'Am I phasing?" We are in mid-August. I would normally be scouring the nearby downs for passage warblers and chats. Even having fantasies of Wrynecks and shrikes. But I'm not. Has fifty years of birding experience told me that to do so will only solicit disappointment? Just a Wheatear or two, maybe even a Whinchat? I could wait a week and drive an hour south and see hundreds of migrants on the South Downs, double-figure counts of Spotted Flycatchers and Common Redstarts to boot. Why not...

The 'insert image' tool is still disabled regardless of my efforts to correct it, so until the fault rectifies itself (which apparently it can do) my blog posts will have to do without images to brighten up an otherwise unbroken sea of words. To be honest that doesn't bother me as much as I thought it would, as this blogging lark has always been more about the words to me - just as well with the current situation. So, where was I?... Ah yes, there was going to be a post about my recent long holiday in Cornwall. What started as a two-week family holiday became one of three-and-a-half weeks, due to a happy set of circumstances that you needn't be bothered with. It was very much a family holiday, but as usual I took along the optics (and the camera, which is being made largely redundant as far as blogging is concerned, although if you follow me on X, WhatsApp or even that quiet place for the more elderly - Facebook - you will still see the results of my automatic point-and...