NORTH DOWNS & BEYOND

To be honest, that headline claim of 4,000 is not correct - 3,970 is the actual figure and that is the number of species that I have identified in the United Kingdom, my pan-species total. There are some people who will ask why I bother to count up the number of species that I have recorded, what does it mean in the grand scheme of things and my reply to that will be somewhat cryptic - it means absolutely nothing and absolutely everything in equal measure. Absolutely nothing? Just look around at the social and political landscape of the world at the moment and tell me that my seeing a new species of nomad bee this week means anything at all. Absolutely everything? Without us recording what species are present and where they occur we cannot possibly have a baseline to inform ourselves on the state of the planet's wildlife - and, as just a single species on this planet's surface we are no more important than a weevil, smut or lacewing.  My current embrace of all things non-bird, ...

One evening, many years ago, I was in a pub with work colleagues when out of the blue one of them stood up (slightly the worse for wear) and let rip in a strong, deep, Northern Irish voice: "It's alright for you feckers, you know where you come from. Me? I've got a Belgian father, a French mother, was brought up in Belfast and have lived most of my adult life in London. What does that make me? Who the feck am I?" He had a point. He didn't feel an affiliation to any one single place, let alone a country. It got me thinking, and 35 years later I still think back to that outburst and how, when I came to consider the question of belonging, realised that I too would find it hard to pin myself firmly to one spot. The more time I spent weighing up the past the stronger came the realisation that I had in fact attached myself to several. The ease with which I have done so suggests that I'm easily persuaded and that my patronage is not hard to secure. Shall we look at t...

Monday 12th April 1976 was when I first trod on the Kentish Dungeness shingle and walked through the front door of the world famous bird observatory (pictured above). I had arrived to become a participating member of an RSPB residential course which was being lead by the society's investigations officer Peter Robinson. Little did I know at the time that I was about to embark on a lifetime's infatuation with all things Dungeness. I have written an awful lot about my time at Dungeness, much of it scattered throughout this blog, so will try not to replicate it here. There was a time when there was nowhere else on Earth that I would rather be and although such manic devotion may have cooled down in recent years it is still a place that causes me to feel a swathe of emotions - happiness, inspiration, longing and, if I'm being really honest, a bit of sadness. My choice of visiting Dungeness was purely by chance - had the RSPB chosen to run that course at Sandwich Bay or Portland ...

Now here's the thing. Most of us who profess to being birders, botanists, coleopterists, dipterists, naturlahistoryists - call it what you like-er-ists - are more than aware of climate change. As observers and lovers of 'all that is wild' you would think that it would be an easy thing to cast aside anything and everything that would add fuel to the collapse of the environment as we now know it. We look, we observe, we record. It is blindingly obvious that our weather is all over the place; that the world's species are responding to this (and mostly in negative ways); that the human being is responsible for such an acceleration in this change; that only sudden changes in the way that we behave can slow this behemoth down. And even then such changes might not amount to anything other than being able to manoeuvre a dire outlook into a bad one. It needs 180 degree turns, lifestyle changes, a reassessment of what we do and how we do it.  Yet... How many of us can honestly sa...

When I first visited Dungeness Bird Observatory I became aware of a band of birders that were unlike any other birders that I had so far met in my formative years of birdwatching. They were all a few years older than me (mostly in their late-20s and early-30s) and appeared streetwise, long-haired, exotically dressed and could pepper their ornithological pronouncements with industrial language. I was impressed! I sought out their company, craved their approval and was slowly admitted into their orbit. But there was one of their number that was not present, who had drifted away from Dungeness to pioneer the vis-mig watches on the east-Kent coast at St. Margaret’s Bay. His name was Tony Greenland. It was not until 1979 that I met him, when he returned to visit Dungeness Bird Observatory (DBO) on a number of occasions throughout that year. I was slightly wary of his colourful reputation but we immediately got on like a house on fire - in fact he took me under his wing. That summer I was ac...

On the evening of 26 April 2022 I met up with fellow birder-cum-football fanatic Jake Everitt to watch the Sutton United v Crawley Town league clash. As we stood in the balmy sunshine, appreciating the home team's demolition of their West Sussex opposition (3-0 final score) we started to talk about the football grounds we had visited and - more pertinently - the species of bird we had seen while watching football. I was surprised to learn that there was another person barmy enough to keep a 'birds seen at football' list - I thought that I was alone in such a niche pastime. As it turned out Jake had been to many more grounds than me and also seen plenty more birds. My records of a Little Egret and Lapwing flying over Gander Green Lane just didn't cut it. There and then we decided to embark on a season-long competition (2022-23) to see who could record more species of bird from football grounds than the other, with the rules of combat being thrashed out. They were: The wi...