NORTH DOWNS & BEYOND

A short non-birding break in Gloucestershire and Herefordshire was based in the small but charming village of Newnham, nestled on the western bank of the River Severn. The accompanying watery images were all taken from there on one of our wanders along a very short section of its length. A morning yomp through a tiny part of the Forest of Dean (4 miles of trail close to Speech Hall) was most enjoyable and enlivened by a group of six Wild Boar which we happily let forage and pass before we continued on our walk - one off them posed for the camera (above). Two Clouded Yellow butterflies in one of the few clearings was a surprise. We also visited Ross-on-Wye and crossed the Welsh border to look around Monmouth - mainly in search of coffee and cake under the disguise of culture.

The vegetation in the region of Banstead (Surrey) can best be summed up by using the following adjectives - crisped, wilted, stressed, exhausted; and the same exercise for flowers throws up spent, sparse, finished and missing. The 'fifth' heatwave across our country has done in a lot of the greenery (have you seen the colour of grass recently?) and dried out the rest to a point where a stray spark can ignite a major event. This seems to be the first year in which many people have finally climbed down off of the 'climate fence' and have started to take the whole subject more seriously. Many will climb back up on to it if we get through the remainder of the summer without further drama, especially if we have a wet autumn. Worrying times. The hot weather has been responsible for a large number of migrant insects to appear in the UK in numbers that were previously the stuff of fantasy. A few sites have clocked up 500-1,000+ Small Mottled Willows in a single night and - reme...

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...

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...

I was having a dream that I was sitting in front of a giant aquarium, watching tropical fish swimming just inches away from my face. Without warning the glass exploded, engulfing me in freezing cold water and shards of glass. And at this violent moment I woke up, to be thoroughly confused as to what was happening as I was, in reality, being assaulted by cold water and broken glass - it was actually happening! Where on earth was I?... Jolted awake it took a few seconds to take in what was occurring. I was sitting in the front seat of Steve Broyd's car and his windscreen had been shattered by a Pheasant that had decided to fly straight at it as we travelled along the road at 50mph. My feeling of being immersed in cold water was, in fact, the cold winter air that was now howling into the opening car front. The glass was real. The Pheasant (a male) lay dead in the back of the car wedged between Bob and Scotty Hibbett. When the bird first entered the car Steve had looked around to see m...

As a family we have a great affection for the north Cornish coast and recently spent a week in the sleepy hamlet of West Pentire, east of Newquay. The area is well known for the wildflower fields that are under the stewardship of the National Trust, full of Common Poppies (largely over when we arrived), Corn Marigolds and other assorted arable plants. The image above gives some flavour as to the colour-scapes that such flowering can create. Corn Marigold is a fast disappearing species in my part of Surrey so it was a joy to see thousands of flowers in their pomp (below). Although not a holiday that had natural history as a central theme I did wander off on a number of occasions, taking advantage of the warm, sunny and settled weather plus the coastal footpath that takes you on a journey through some of the most stunning scenery the UK has to offer. I ventured as far as Perranporth on foot, via Polly Joke, Kelsey Head and the imposing sand dunes of both Holy Well and Perran. Considering...

From my folder marked 'Mystery Pictures' - best left to the experts... He may not have kicked over a hornet's nest exactly, but Seth Gibson's recent blog post on Pan-species Listing (PSL) ( you can read it here ) has certainly stirred up a bit of debate on social media (including a blog post from Alastair Forsyth which you can read here ). This is my contribution to the conversation. I think I can safely say that I was in at the start of the whole PSL movement. I had, just like Seth, independently started to collate a list of every living organism that I had recored in the UK and, just like Seth, this was primarily a lumping together of my bird, plant, butterfly, moth and dragonfly lists plus a handful of obvious others (ie Stag Beetle, Pike, Fox, you get the picture). My non-core identification library was scant and woefully inadequate, but it was all that I had to use - remember, these were pre-internet days! If I saw a wasp, fly, beetle or fungus, I took my basic ide...

Priest Hill. Until the Second World War it was north Surrey farmland, a mix of arable (wheat, barley, oats and potatoes) with a small herd of Jersey cows that were used for milking. A demand for the payment of death duties meant that the owners were forced to sell, which in 1942 brought in the tidy sum of £100,000 from Surrey and London County Councils. The farm was demolished in 1956 which then lead to the building of Ewell Technical College and the creation of playing fields for the use of Tulse Hill School, used to service its 2,000+ pupils, who were bussed in from South London. When Tulse Hill closed in 1990 the playing fields, changing rooms, tennis courts and cricket nets were abandoned to vandals, graffiti artists, fly tippers, travellers, glue sniffers, motor bike off-roaders... and me. I used to wander across the fast vegetating land, a vast open wasteland, to see what alien plants were springing up and what (few) birds I could find. A bit of the land was saved (Glyn Schoo...

The heading of this post may give you the false impression that I had some sort of connection with David Hockney - maybe that we shared studio space, or he was a drinking buddy - but no, we never met and he certainly had never heard of me, whereas I, of course, had heard of him. It would be virtually impossible to think of a list of the highly creative individuals that blessed the 1960s and not have him in their number: The Beatles, Twiggy, Terence Stamp, David Bailey, Mary Quant, David Hockney… they all slip off the tongue with ease and without so much as a need to think about it because they were all so iconic of that era - and continue to be so, so strong are their legacies. ‘A Bigger Splash’ and ‘Mr and Mrs Clark and Percy’ are just two of his paintings that will be familiar to many and just as redolent of the brightness and freedom of the 1960s as is ‘Sgt. Pepper’ and the mini-skirt. If I’m being honest, I’m not old enough to fully appreciate what was going on at this time - I can...