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Picture this (1)

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I'm a great believer in living for, and in, the moment. To not worry about the where, the what or the need to put that moment down on paper, on a computer spreadsheet or manifest itself as an assemblage of pixels on a memory card. But sometimes, if you have a camera on you - and you utilise it -  you can capture that moment in a meaningful way. And a reviewing of that captured image can help you relive that moment in a far more vivid way - it isn't always the case and rarely does it happen. The following images are not necessarily pin-sharp (almost certainly not so!) but can convey, to me at least, something beyond them being but a record shot. There will be others, these being the first in a series. The captions should be self explanatory. Dungeness, Kent: in recent years the Cormorant has become a plague bird - thousands wintering on the point, roosting on the RSPB reserve and flying out to feed over the sea across Rye and Lade Bays. They have - at least to my eyes - become a...
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A shepherd's tale

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In the spring of 1999 I was walking westwards along the North Downs Way at the base of the scarp slope, just past Juniper Hill. In the distance I could see a patch of vivid inky-blue which I assumed would be a grounded helium balloon or, less exotically, a plastic bag. As I got closer this colouration revealed itself to be a small group of large gentian flowers. They did not match anything in my botanical field guide so I took some photos and carried on walking, perplexed as to what these gentians could be. Later in the day I was able to refer to some literature - and it was Stace's second edition of his 'New Flora of the British Isles' that solved the puzzle - they were revealed as being Gentiana clusii (Trumpet Gentian)*, planted and naturalised along that very same section of the Surrey North Downs since 1960. Since then I have, on a number of occasions, revisited this clump of gentians, plus another patch (some half-a-mile further west and higher up the scarp slope) - e...
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Hidden gems

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In the last post I suggested that I might be going all out to get to 4,000 species for my UK Pan-species list. This morning saw me out in the garden, holding a washing up bowl in one hand and beating Ivy and Pieris with a stick in the other. Had I gone mad? Maybe, but the result was - apart from a bit of vegetative debris - a number of invertebrates in the bowl, including several new species! All common, but it just goes to show that there is plenty of low hanging fruit literally on one's doorstep.  This afternoon I walked up to Banstead Downs with one species firmly on my radar. Local naturalist Neil had recorded several White-shouldered Shieldbugs where the Lixus iridis weevils are, and this was an invert that I was keen on seeing! However, after two hours searching I had to make do with a number of Dock Bugs, Brassica Bugs, Woundwort Shieldbugs and a single Tortoise Shieldbug. I'll be back soon. I was, however able to add a further six species to my pan-species list that has...
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4,000

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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, ...
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Origin and belonging

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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...
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50 years ago

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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 ...
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Cultivating our own garden

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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...
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