Manifesto

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 do. There is the argument of course is that I don't really need one, why not just go out, look and enjoy myself with no agenda. I've tried that, it doesn't work. For as much as I can send my observations to the relavant recording bodies and ensure that my sightings are of use - which I do - I also crave an agenda of a personal nature. It could be as simple as keeping a year list for any of the groups that I 'study'; or an attempt to take a group seriously and become more proficient in it rather than the standard dabbling; or majoring on one patch. Last November I decided to go out and seek those species of plants that were still flowering during that late month and had a whale of a time. This year I've been meandering. No firm local plans. Ad hoc moth trapping. Apart from my two spring Dungeness sessions little birding has been done. I've rather neglected plants and flitted about with invertebrates (mainly bees) in which I have moved from 'complete novice' to the now heady heights of 'novice'.

The second thing is Kevin Thornton (you can follow him on Bluesky @lowcarbonkev.bsky.social). I have a purely online relationship with Kevin, we've never met but have enjoyed (well at least I have) a lively correspondence over the years. I am in awe of his ornithological knowledge and have followed with interest his adoption of a new way of birding - or 'not birding' - although, of course he still does bird, just not with binoculars and not as his raison d'etre as to why he gets out of bed in the morning and leaves his front door - and not only that but to walk or use public transport having forsaken the car. He is now, if he doesn't mind me labelling him, a 'social and natural historian', as keen to share (with anybody who is interested) a church, a ship, a watermill, a railway cutting, or a Victorian brick terrace as much as he is with the feeding habits and roosting strategies of the Medway estuary waders. I can buy into this - in fact I have been guilty of it in the past but haven't quite taken the plunge and certainly not the full immersion that he has. When I have wandered along those fine but tiny Surrey rivers (Hogsmill and Wandle, the latter pictured above) my attention can be taken away from the Kingfishers and Little Egrets with ease and passed fully onto the industrial history of these areas (gunpowder mills, tanning and paper factories, workers cottages). Out on the downs and coming across a fine church the likelihood is that I'll enter if it is open and take in the stained glass as if it were a rare bird. Or find a chalk pit and look for the railway sleepers that mark the old and now abandoned carriage lines where the winnings were taken away to be spread onto the poor farming soils nearby or sent off to be turned into cleaning agent (hundreds of thousands of London doorsteps cannot be wrong!) Is my attention too wildlife-centric? Is there room for a surrender to other things? I do it for football, why not embrace all of the 'in plain sight' delights on offer, all free, all educational? Part of the tapestry of life.

And then there is the very hot elephant in the room. Climate change. I find it hard to carry on as if nothing is happening. I touched on this on my last post so won't repeat myself here. Needless to say, we are currently experiencing changes in the world's climate that would have taken hundreds, if not thousands of years to gradually, incrementally happen, but now they do so at such an accelerated speed that these changes are being measured in weeks. And I mean weeks. Projections are that this acceleration will only quicken. Not worried? You should be. Sorry, I'm now repeating myself - back to the subject of this particular post. Can I organise my time in the field in a better way, one in which my carbon footprint is lessened to a meaningful level without beating myself up too much and ending up playing the victim? To completely give up on driving is possible - to only walk, take public transport for longer journeys - but such actions are impractical for many reasons, especially if you have dependents. Yes, it could be done, but at other peoples cost and one that I am not prepared to take. Would I want to give up on my dawn starts on the North Downs for vis-mig sessions or to forgo trips to the coast? No. But compromises are something that I've done for a number of years now and can continue to do. The car can still stay on the driveway more often than not. My OAP bus pass is there and I'm embracing the life of a 'busw*nker' with pride! I might even start a 'seen from public transport' list! We can all evaluate our actions as we go along, pruning a bit here, adding a bit there, in the hope that we are doing our bit towards not only helping ourselves but to help others to. That latter point is, unfortunately, lost on many. I've dabbled with the idea of taking a small area of the unberpatch - my home town of Banstead - and just covering it on foot throughout 2027 to create a snapshot of the state of play with its wildlife. Produce a report. Deposit it wherever it would be welcomed (local library at least) to act as a document that future naturalists can use to evaluate change. It can act as an anecdotal narrative that the databases such as BirdTrack and the BSBI cannot replicate - they hold hard fact, dots on a map, but maybe not the stories behind the local picture. That isn't to say that I'd do nothing else, as this could be an ongoing project that would fit in between others. And that will still include dawn starts on the downs and carrying on visiting Dungeness.

2026 may well be the year when I finally sit up and give thought to what I do and how I do it. To sleepwalk into 2027 with a blindfold on and ear plugs in is not an option.