NORTH DOWNS & BEYOND

I really haven't got my act together since I returned from Dungeness at the end of May - besides a family holiday to Cornwall at the beginning of July my time in the field has been woeful. A lack of oomph, missing mojo, the relentless heat, you name it and I'll re-christen it as an excuse. Last Friday I decided that enough was enough and I was long overdue some time out 'in the wild'. Surrey Hills? No, no way, parched dry and lacking in birds at the best of times, I needed a bit of an ornithological shot in the arm and my destination was to be a little further afield.  I settled on the Arun Valley in West Sussex. I've searched the river valley either side of Arundel before and have always had a great day out. PLUS... Arundel FC were playing at home to Ringmer AFC in Division One of the Southern Combination at 3pm on Saturday afternoon, so I put one and one together and came up with a big fat two (birding and football!) - what wasn't to like? I arrived at Arundel...

We all need our happy places. These happy places become our mind's bolt-holes, a mechanism to reset, good for our mental wellbeing and act as refuges in times of trouble or uncertainty. They can stabilise our thought processes, remove us from the present if the present is somewhat unpalatable or, if we just wish to embark on a bit of happy time-travelling, are a ready made destination to do so. And - because they exist in reality, are beacons of calmness to be visited when time and logistics allow. Fortunately I have several happy places. It will come as no surprise to long-time readers of this blog that Dungeness is one of them. To save on any repetition I will not dwell there as my reasons for its inclusion have already been shared with you down the years. But there are others. For a happy place to become a happy place can take years to be accepted as such or it may be instantaneously given the honour. Off the top of my head here is the first of my (non-Dungeness) happy places. O...

The Blogger analytics figures report that, as of this moment, ND&B has been visited 3,044,462 times. On July 26th alone 20,385 of you clicked on your mice - or pressed your screen - to see what was going on. Nonsense I know. How many of these visitors were genuine human beings? I'll never know. How many were in reality carried out by an automated software programme, also known as a bot? Plenty I'd wager. Good for stats if this blogging lark was purely a numbers game, which as far as I'm concerned it isn't. To be honest it's all beyond me... Anyway, for those of you who are human I thought I'd do a little round up of the back garden mothing news. Here in Surrey we are still without rain (getting on for 40 days now) and the daily maximum temperatures are above 30C more regularly than are underneath it. The grass is burnt caramel, vegetation wilting. There is no good news here really, although perversely if you are running a moth trap you try and find a silver...

When I began birding in the mid-1970s you could count the number of celebrity birders not on one hand but on one finger, and that finger belonged to Robert Dougal, a gentleman newsreader of advanced years who dressed soberly and conducted himself with impeccable manners - not the type of personality to became a role model for us young aspiring birders. And then, out of the celebrity-birder vacuum appeared a long-haired and bearded man who was one third of a cult TV comedy programme, who possessed street cred AND was a proper birder. His name was Bill Oddie. To be a schoolboy of a certain age in the early to mid-seventies meant that there were two big television highlights each week that were not to be missed. They were 'Monty Python's Flying Circus' and 'The Goodies'. Both were slightly subversive, off-the-wall and created by Oxbridge graduates that had turned comedy into not just an art form, not only full of social comment but infused it with an intelligence that ...

There has been much 'bigging up' and love shown for the Olympus TG7 camera recently, the reviewers raving about its macro facility and the fact that not only is it robust but it can also be used underwater. Although my current bridge camera is good for general photography (and is wonderful for birds at range) I must admit that it does not perform so well at the macro level. I recently spent some time in the field with Graeme Lyons who owns a TG7 and was blown away with the results that he got from such a modestly priced bit of kit - a tiny beetle that I could just about see revealed all kinds of form and pattern when its image was captured by the Olympus. Yesterday I purchased one. Early days and I've only just charged up the battery - however I hurriedly took a few sample images this morning and thought I'd share with you a couple of the results. One of the features of the macro (or microscope mode) is that you can set the camera to take a stack of shots of your flower...

Nostalgia. Is it a wimpish retreat into a bygone age, a celebration of what has gone before or just a plain old symptom of being a sentient human being who can look back as well as look forward? Maybe it is all three? I'm always mindful of Spike Milligan's take on the subject, an obsessive nostalgianarian (I may have just made up that word). He wrote something along the lines of - 'do we always look back in time because the present is troubling, the future is uncertain but the past is a known quantity' - some thing like that. I'm also drawn to the final line in F Scott Fitzgerald's novel 'The Great Gatsby' which is 'so we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past'. I wish I'd written that. Almost as good as 'I've seen things you people wouldn't believe' - I'll stop there before I go full flow into a response such as... "a quarter of a million hirundines fleeing the Kent coast and heading...