NORTH DOWNS & BEYOND

2021 - pretty crap, wasn't it... So welcome then to 2022, which doesn't have to try too hard to be a better year than the last - I just hope that I haven't tempted fate or jinxed it by writing that! Plans. Every New Year has plans. I vary from creating a monstrous list of aims and ideas which, slowly during the first few months of the year, crash and burn. I am now a more circumspect 'planner'. I like to have something to hang my natural history observations on (a bit like the relationship a pair of trousers has with a clothes hanger), so do try and get a bit of process behind my sightings. At the very least this will include writing up my notes; making my observations available to the databases via BirdTrack and Trektellen; be a conscientious team-player by tweeting and WhatsApping my sightings; and keeping this very blog alive. Last year I posted fewer times than ever before, my mojo having gone missing. Hopefully it has been refound. 2022 seems to be the year tha...

I don't know whether or not we are coming to the end of a decade or not - some say that at the finish of 2020 is when we reach the real end - but let us suppose that we are. Another 10 year chunk of time has passed us by, the big clock has been ticking at it hasn't stopped for no man, bird, plant, dragonfly, butterfly or moth. Back in 2010 could we really have conceived of three-figure flocks of Cattle Egrets, of winters as mild as a poor summer and passerine numbers disappearing into a black hole? What will we find when we await at the gates of 2030? To be honest, I shudder to think. Anyhow, that's it for 2019. Not a marvellous year if I'm being honest, it had its moments but there was an awful lot of mediocrity to wade through. Normally I have plans in plenty for the upcoming year, but they seem to have gone missing. I'm going to busk it. I'm not sure where I will be tomorrow, it's that open. Maybe a bit more time down at Dungeness, a few more plant s...

if the outgoing year has been kind, we hope that the new one will carry on in the same vein. If it has been a year to forget, we hope that the new one will change tack and give us something positive to cling on to. For the birder, the botanist or the moth-er, we hope that we will come across the unusual, the wonderful and the inspirational. Hope. Such a flimsy concept, such a modest aim, but one that drives on the human endeavour and spirit. Here's hope to us all for 2015.