How’s this big month going?
Not well. I may have pooh-poohed my record effort of 135 in May 1998 but three weeks now have brought me a mere 94 species. It’s taken the aforementioned walk through Bristol and visits to the Severn Estuary, Chew, Ibsley, Pennington Marsh and the New Forest. I could complain that working has crippled the quest: my freelance days in Scotland used to deliver regular 100+ months.
But I was working in 1998. A future post will regale you with those events.
Not that this month has been without its highlights. For a start, the flooding and gales continue to play a supporting role. The River Avon at Ibsley (and all the way up to Salisbury, and then the Wylye beyond) was still spreading across its valley. Many trees were down through Hampshire and Sussex. Pennington was as pictured, wetter than I’ve seen it.
That too held the best of the birds. Long-billed dowitcher was a first for Hampshire, as oddly were knot. They took a bit of identifying, asleep and mixed in with grey plovers and dunlin. Persistence allowed me to finally nail one as being of intermediate size and with a longish bill. Hundreds of Brent geese and several spotted redshanks were a nice addition too.
Other notables were a merlin near Blake’s Pools, red kite and red-legged partridge along the Wiltshire section of Cranbourne Chase, a tawny owl at my brother’s new place near Henfield and finally a Dartford warbler at Goatspen in the New Forest.
The plan this weekend, weather permitting, is to hit a few more local spots and maybe spin a new England record. I wonder how that stands. Perhaps I should go with the zeitgeist and list regionally – Wessex in this case. What’s good for Scotland will be good for us. And it will be good for Scotland as countries increasingly feel the need to downsize to escape the strangling excesses of globalisation.
How small could we go? Back to city states is my guess.