NORTH DOWNS & BEYOND

Dungeness is a superb location for seeking out invertebrates, be they common-place or specialists. For a 'jack of all trades' like myself - and certainly no expert - such immersion into the world of insects can be daunting, but ultimately highly rewarding. Identification down to species level will not be possible for many of the individuals that you might come across, but sometimes just being able to identify the creature before you to a specific family is reward enough. And, at times, you just need to admit defeat when you realise that the bee you are watching might just be a hoverfly, or even a wasp - it is OK to hold your hands up and surrender! You are also opening yourself up to life on a steep learning curve when looking at tiny insects with the aid of a magnifying glass or a loop, only to realise that there are even smaller insects alongside them. Are these even smaller beasts a different species or nymphs of the larger ones with them? Questions, questions... A few of my...

It was but a month ago that I suggested that staying at Dungeness Bird Observatory (DBO) might be a thing of the past for me. Seeing that I have just returned from a week’s residency at that very same establishment proves that I really do not know my a*** from my elbow… And what an enjoyable week it was. There may not have been the volume of migrants that were hoped for,  but there was rarity, there was a more than passable passage at sea, the invertebrates were forthcoming and the pleasure to be gained from meeting up with friends old and new was priceless. It will come as no surprise to even the most casual of visitors to this blog that the shingle, once again, burrowed its way deep inside of me and on more than a few occasions I found myself stopping in my tracks to take in special moments - I will try to put these moments into words, although words can rarely evoke the feelings that these jolts of joy produce. Star billing went to Dungeness’s third Iberian Chiffchaff, found sin...

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...

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...

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...

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...

‘ Pan Species Listing - How to Become a Super-naturalist’ has recently been published by Pelagic and is authored by Graeme Lyons. Regular visitors to ND&B will be familiar with Graeme as his blog appears in my blog list (found to the left) and he has featured on these very pages more than once. I think that I can safely refer to Graeme as a friend as we have spent time in the field together on several occasions (including some one-to-one sessions) and have conversed on subjects beyond those of natural history. I was therefore more than intrigued to find out what form his book on the subject would take. When he told me that he had been commissioned to write it I assumed that it would be mainly about his personal journey - I was wrong. Having now read the book and lived with it for a few weeks I feel in a position to review it. Putting it simply, it is a book that all naturalists should invest in whether they are a pan-species lister or not. It might only be late March but I feel co...

On Monday morning I left Horsham town centre clutching an OS map of the area and headed out eastwards to explore. There was no agenda and no firm plan other than to follow my instincts and try to end up on the high ground west of Handcross. All the footpaths that I walked were unknown to me and so the habitat that I came across and the views that opened up before me were, by and large, surprises - a lucky dip kind of day. It is a wonderful way to get to know an area and any expectations that I might have harboured were exceeded! This ‘blind tasting’ is something that I will do more of. The habitat was characterised by wet woodland criss-crossed by many streams with accompanying pools and ponds. There were also several large medieval hammer ponds, the streams having been dammed to create the right conditions for the water to power huge hammers (which were built alongside accompanying furnaces) that pounded the iron-rich clay to extract the metal for the production of armaments. The sign...

Back in June 2010 I was walking along the banks of the River Mole, heading towards the Young Street Car Park from Mickleham. A series of fields between the river and railway line were usually left as grass, but on this occasion piles of farmyard waste had been dumped across them, transforming the normal green monoculture into an altogether stranger terrain. But what was most striking about this unexpected scene was the presence of a disturbing and exotic flower growing from the mounds - Henbane (pictured above and directly below). Like mini-Trifids they stood upright from the mud and mulch, the serrated and hairy leaves topped off by cream flowers, large lobed and netted with an intricate maroon-brown scribbling, at their centre a pool of dried blood. They exuded an other-worldliness. It was a species that I had longed to see but the erratic nature of their appearance had ensured that it had eluded me. Finally, thanks to the farmer's dumped soil I had connected! Dumped soil. Doesn...