NORTH DOWNS & BEYOND

If you are a regular visitor to ND&B you will be aware that I have recently written a lengthy account of my formative years birding during the 1970s (you can download it by visiting the rather grandly named 'ND&B Publications' tab above this post and underneath the blog header.) I was only able to bring together such a detailed account because, at the time of the observations, I had written at length about them and kept all of my notebooks. There were some memories strong enough to not have needed a written history to refer to, but many more that did. I have been heartened to have received a positive feedback to the project, and what with the enjoyment that I took from producing it, have started on the next one - based on my 1980s birding experience. I started to look through my notebooks from that period of time and found out something troubling - my enthusiasm for narrative and description was, at times, deserted in the mid-1980s. It wasn't completely abandoned, ...

I’ve been an avid writer for as long as I can remember. As a child I would make up stories and write them as neatly as possible on sheets of lined paper. If I were feeling particularly grand I would get hold of a small notebook and try to fill it up as if I were creating a novel. At school I loved nothing better than to be in my English class with an essay assignment. When birding came along (aged 15) I was able to transfer this wordsmithery to notebooks in which I recorded the observations I had made, in both a diary and a ‘posh’ notebook, which would expand the sightings into a narrative. These were written, by pen, in neat hand. To re-read them now is both entertaining and cringing - they can come across as pompous, with my writing obviously geared not for my eyes but those of an imagined reader. Some verged on rambling saga and flowery narrative. They always mentioned numbers. As the 1980s progressed, the birds started to share the space with moths and butterflies, and plant...

My latter-day natural history notes and lists are largely objects that don't largely physically exist beyond being pixels on a screen that disappear as soon as a computer is switched off. As much as the information on which they are built has been compiled by my physical and, at times, emotional endeavour, they lack a character - it is but cold data. However, that same 'information' that has, in the past, been written by my fair hand onto paper.... well, this is something that has spirit, it is a combination of personal touch and a gift from the natural world via a tree. I can hold it, smell it, fold it (but maybe not a hard-backed notebook!). It can also be browsed through, organic reminders of what I've seen, where I've been and what I thought. The computer screen does not allow such emotions to come so easily flooding back on a personal level. My old notebooks are great reminders of who I was at the time, from the state of my handwriting to the use of phrase - I ...