And a New Wildlifing Year?
Looking ahead into 2025
And so another year begins, with new bird (and plant and insect) year lists to start amassing on a clean page plus a newly designed mast-head for the “Whilst out Walking” newsletters.
I had this week’s newsletter all done-and-dusted and ready to release into the world when I happened upon this opening paragraph in”The Woodlands of Ivor” by Robert Lacombe and … well, it spoke as they say:
I’ve heard it said that Naturalists, like chess masters or fine musicians tend to be a single minded lot. At an early age many slip down the rabbit hole into their private wonderlands, and what they find there becomes almost their sole preoccupation for the rest of their lives.
You will have taken on board that, while I am easily led down rabbit holes into which I hope you will follow, my original and main purpose is to enthuse and inform readers about how much interesting wildlife and plantlife is to be found almost on our doorsteps. It’s not all out there somewhere in the wilderness. It’s not all hard to discover.
"You don't have to travel to a distant rainforest to find new and beautiful things — you just have to step outside and look," Scott Egan, an associate professor of biosciences, Rice University campus, Houston
I have several times been asked “where should I begin?” and “how did you begin?” Accompanied by variations on “I really like this stuff, but it’s sometimes discouragingly hard to learn”. The short answers to those three questions are (1) Right outside your front door, (2) I’m coming to that and (3) One step at a time. What follows is my personal experience as an answer to the second question in the expectation that will and answer the other two for you along the way.
Early Days with Mr. Fisher
I grew up in an industrial town in the north of England during the 1950s/60s. My parents were not at all well off and almost all summer vacations were spent with grandparents in the other end of the country because that was just about affordable. In the north, there were parks (it was one of those cities in which the more socially conscious Victorian forefathers had “believed” in parks for the people) but it was the summer weeks in a village on the southern edge of Exmoor that really drew me into contact with nature. I’ve never been afraid to ask questions and it obviously came to my grandfather’s attention that there were things he didn’t have the answers to. He and my father were engineers - a field of knowledge that 60+ years later is still a closed book for me. Anyway, shortly after we arrived for the summer break, I must have been aged 9 or 10, I was presented with a set of bird field guides that all these years later I still have (Truth to tell, I had lost the originals but J sourced replacements and had them shipped to me here in Canada. She’s a gem. ). Modern field guides come with colour illustrations and ultra-detailed artwork but these were forerunners of the genre and still, to my mind, some of the best ever published with all the basic information anyone could need; especially at the age of ten.
There are three volumes, all published in 1951, 74 years ago. Vol.1 covered seabirds and waders, vol 2 dealt with raptors and waterfowl and the rest, game birds, songbirds etc, appeared in vol. 3. The text was informative, the distribution maps very useful, but what appealed to my nerdish instincts from the first page was a circular graphic that told me immediately what any of the species was up to at any given month of the year. I have never seen that feature repeated elsewhere but it is such a brilliant and universally accessible idea. The example below is for the Merlin, a species that is present on both sides of the Atlantic.
So, young kid, fascinated by wildlife but now I had a real “bird book” for information. What more could I want? In fact, what more could anyone want even today. Basic tools of the trade … today I would suggest to novice birders that you get a copy of the Sibley or National Geographic field guides for North America and the Collins Bird Guide for Britain and mainland Europe. You can’t go wrong. If insects or plants are more interesting then there are equivalent guides for you too … I came to insects later in life (college days) and plants even later (botanical wife). There are also plenty of fine internet resources and apps for our phones.
The moral of this tale is really that you don’t need much to get you started. A basic field guide, some common sense and a pair of stout boots to take you from your front door right into the neighborhood nature where you can see and notice creatures and plants. The addition of a pair of binoculars will take you to even higher levels of interest and enjoyment.
If the world is to achieve any of the necessary environmental remedies then there will have to be a generation of keen and enthusiastic and above all knowledgeable youngsters willing and able to take up the fight as our generations begin to fall by the wayside. On the famous, Jesuit “Give me the child before he is seven and …” principle it’s key to seize their attention when they are young, gently exposing them to the natural world and ensuring that they find it as magical as we do. Do this before they commit to careers and a future lifestyle divorced from nature. Having adults around who will help nurture the spark and answer their questions with facts, is important.
Just think if all children could occasionally be taken birding (or bugging, or botanising) and helped to see and become involved with what is around them. I am sure that few children who find their own “spark bird” or “fabulous fungus” early enough, anything that makes them go “Wow!”, when their minds are open to new experiences, can fail to care about such matters for the rest of their lives. What’s more, there is a better chance that they may be prepared to advocate for, and protect, wild creatures and the places they live, throughout their lives. I believe the trick is to play it low-key. Avoid didactic lectures and allow the kids to approach you with questions about what catches their fancy. Have simple answers ready, and don’t be boring.
Going back to my young days, probably the year I received Mr. Fisher’s books, there is a tale that I wrote about back in November of 2023 about my “spark bird” (picture below) that I think you might enjoy reading it - please follow this link:
https://1001species.substack.com/p/follow-the-kids-on-a-nature-walk?utm_source=publication-search
Sparking Discovery
Following the above theme, I can’t help being envious of this young lady’s finding. I found this on the CBC website a couple of days ago …
A girl named Daisy Cadet discovered this unusual moth in her living room in Port Talbot, Wales, and posted it on Instagram. One of her followers suggested getting in touch with a British charity called Butterfly Conservation, which connected her with the Natural History Museum. Some sleuthing eventually revealed that it had hatched from a fragment of a seed pod stuck in the boot of Cadet's mom, Ashleigh, a professional photographer, when she flew home from an assignment in central Guyana. Mark Sterling, a Natural History Museum researcher, helped identify it as a clearwing moth and name the new species Carmenta brachyclados.
There is also an article from the Natural History Museum [LINK] that explains the serendipitous detective work behind working out what this species was. Quite fascinating … well, to my sort of people anyway 😉
Which reminded me of the following piece:
May we raise children who love the unloved things – the dandelion, worms spiderlings.
Children who sense the rose needs the thorn run into rainswept days the same way they turn towards the sun.
And when they're grown & someone has to speak for those who have no voice may they draw upon that wilder bond, those days of tending tender things and be the ones.
- Nicolette Sowder
Garden Birding Accounts
For many years we have recorded our bird sightings to eBird - I only just discovered that I can get a personalized yard list in the form of monthly bar charts. Maybe this is a new feature? Anyway, perhaps this will encourage readers to try to submit regular bird sightings to eBird - below is a link to our personal garden bar-chart …. Noting that this is just a regular sized suburban garden, Admittedly we grow native plants, we have trees and we maintain year round bird feeders, but even then we are pleased with the result. Go on - make 2025 the year that you decide to outdo us. It’s interesting to be able to see the spring and fall migration peaks for so many birds we don’t see in other months.
https://ebird.org/barchart?byr=1900&bmo=1&emo=12&r=L352536&personal=true
If you are new to eBird, note that your daily efforts may not always tally a lot of birds, but as long as you are searching your hardest, complete checklists from busy streets, bad weather days, or at night are all important. While long lists and rare species are often the targets for a day of birding, the scientific value of an eBird list is not measured by the quantity or quality of the bird list. In fact, it is often the short counts from undersampled areas that are most valuable. One of the main scientific challenges with understanding eBird data is that effort tends to be concentrated around birding hotspots, rare birds, and certain types of habitats. If eBirders commit to following our best practices and participate in the “Checklist-a-day” challenge, we can help fill in the eBird maps for the blank spaces between eBird hotspots … lists with zero species are still welcomed in eBird. We recommend that you add some checklist notes indicating that you tried for birds and found none.
New year and new ventures. We are not great travelers, getting on a plane once a year is usually more than enough to sap our will to live, but over the years we have done some wildlifing a little further from our home patch than is usually covered here. I plan to share just a few of our star observations - and not only of birds, not by any means - from those adventures for you pleasure. For example:
In 2015 we were wildlifing in Iceland where we crossed paths with this stunning Black-tailed Godwit (Limosa limosa) ambling through a field of buttercups. Godwits from the Icelandic population overwinter in England so if that’s where you are reading this from, maybe you will see some too. In North America though, sorry, you will have to make do with different related birds.
In western Scotland, a Common Buzzard drifted close overhead
An orchid, possibly Three-toothed Orchid (Neotinea tridentata), found in a nature reserve in the Czech Carpathians that is devoted to wild flowers … the fields were covered in an amazing variety.
The “Noticing Nature Initiative”
Probably 99% of people reading this will be doing this (link below) as a matter of course. It seems strange to me that there people walking around grumbling with their minds closed to the world and not noticing the birds and butterflies … still, anything that helps is worth pursuing.
The start of a new year: a time for optimism, ambitious plans to improve the world, and the grim suspicion that the first couple of months may well be a miserable slog through the deepest of winter’s gloom. … but can such a simple trick (noticing nature) really hope to have an impact? The simplicity of the intervention should not put people off, Passmore argues. “People tend to discount how good they’re going to feel when they notice nature,” she said. “Part of it is our whole western society. We want a pill, we want something new and improved, we always want the latest.”
… and, along similar lines, the “Awe Walk”
“These people — 75 years old or older — over time felt less pain and distress. Chronic pain and pain when you’re old is serious. It just rattles your consciousness, and here was a little technique that gave them some peace.”
Not anything much to share in this department right now, what with snow and ice and all things not so nice - just a reminder that this topic will move up the list of matters to discuss as the year progresses and spring approaches.
In the meantime, it behooves us to design AND MANAGE spaces with intention, knowing the plants and tending the space as a new kind of gardener – not a gardener who applies herbicides or annual mulch or fertilizers that pollute waterways, but a gardener who learns plants and maintains a sensible balance of design and activism for a healthier future.
For now, sit down and do some planning. There is no compulsion to do anything at all this year if you don’t want to, you could let your garden have a year off if you are happy with the way it is going and not do much more than keep the paths from getting overgrown. Inveterate fiddlers like we are can’t do that but you can if you want … so long as the birds and bees stick around then things are good.
Next week we may meet some Ravens.
Loved the story about the Clear Wing.