NORTH DOWNS & BEYOND

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...

I've always liked to have plans, to have projects in the pipeline, a peg to hang my natural history sightings on, a reason behind why I do things even if those reasons are based more on a whim rather than scientific rationale. I also like to change things around a bit, hence my flitting between patches or swapping my core interests - normally birds, sometimes moths, there again it could be plants. Or trying to big up my Pan-species list. Itchy feet, a wandering mind, call it what you will but it is something that I have always suffered (or been blessed) with. And as the year starts to fade away (yes I know it is only July!) I like to prepare the ground for next year, that human construct of a time-line that some of us are slaves to. So, what has prompted my latest bout of 'thinking' - yes I can be accused of thinking now and again! Well, several things. First up is that need for me to hang my natural history sightings on a peg, to give a bit of reason and purpose to what I ...

For the inland moth trapper the chance of recording a scarce migrant moth is much higher than an inland birder recording a scarce migrant bird. I like to think of Vestals, Bordered Straws and Delicates as the lepidopteran equivalent of Yellow-browed Warblers, Red-backed Shrikes and Wrynecks - maybe not quite equals but I'm sure you get my drift. The latest heatwave has managed to send some more migrant moths to my modest inland garden in Surrey, with the first record of Ni Moth (pictured) plus two Small Mottled Willows - and on the back of two Striped Hawk-moths so far this year (plus a good few months of possible action to come) 2026 is turning out to be a decent year for continental wanderers. I have been recording the moths here in Banstead since 1987 and thought it a worthwhile exercise to tot up all of the migrant species that have come my way. I left out the much commoner species, such as noctuella, ferrugalis, and Silver Y, plus a few others that may have been pure migrants ...

I don't know how historians of the future will look back on the current period of time and how they will analyse it. What will they make of our species knowingly engineering an environmental breakdown, of the cover-ups, the denials, the greed? My fear is of a dystopian future, the obscenely rich and powerful living behind heavily protected barriers where new technologies and limitless money can stave-off the worst of the deprivations that the vast majority of the population suffer. I used to think that 'climate change' was going to be fed to us as a gradual process, the hotter summers, windier frontal systems and heavier rain incremental and slowly accepted. But not now. These life-threatening increases in temperature; the alarming melting of ice-caps, glaciers and permafrost; flash floods and landslides that are not generational events but are now annual ones - I haven't even mentioned crop failure, water insecurity and societal breakdown. There is no 'new normal...