Happy New Year!
It's been an interesting year for me - wonderful in many ways, disappointing in others. I'm sure many others could say the same.
This coming year presents a lot of opportunities, some ripe for the taking, others which will require more effort and preparation to come to fruition. I'm looking forward to these most of all.
I'm not going to bore anyone reading this with a list of resolutions which I will probably fail to succeed in anyway, but there is one goal I have which I thought was worth sharing as it will likely form a quite significant portion of what I will write about in the course of the year.
Country Walking Magazine are running a campaign (if you can call it that) to get people out and about on their feet. Walking 1000 miles in one year! I liked the sound of this and decided to adopt it. Sound like a lot? Well if you break it down it's less than 20 miles per week, or about 2 3/4 miles per day. Not a lot in the grand scheme of things. I have several times in my teenage years (read also fitter years) walked more than 40 miles in a single day. Due to various activities I am involved in I don't think just walking the distance would be all that difficult, especially if things like walking my daughter to school count. So I decided I'd discount walking on pavements (unless for a short distance on route to somewhere more interesting), and also ignore (which would hopefully be pretty obvious) the too-ing and fro-ing of day to day life.
Even that didn't seem to be enough of a challenge though, I wanted to add another dimension so I came up with the idea, in the dying hours of New Years Eve, of doing another thousand something - making it a 10002 challenge you might say. Something to add an extra level of interest, an extra level of challenge, something preferably to stretch me mentally along with the physical stretching of the walking.
The 'optional extra' I settled on is identifying and recording 1000 species. This I thought would be a suitable challenge, it gives my thousand miles of walking an extra dimension, a purpose beyond the covering of distance. While I am the first to say I could do with being fitter, in all humility I am probably still fit enough that just walking 20 miles a week isn't going to make a massive difference to my fitness and losing weight is something I don't really need to worry about at present. This however will stretch me - while I have been pushing myself to expand my identification skills of late, this gives me a target. I've never been one to keep lists of sightings of anything like that, so this will be covering new ground for me. I will also aim to submit these records, or ones of significance anyway, to recording schemes where my efforts can be added to the efforts of many others to benefit real world conservation efforts.
One more note to add - I've decided to make it extra hard for myself by not counting species I see while I'm just driving around, or out of windows. I actually have to be walking, or at least working, out and about to count it. Should keep me alert!
I hope you find some interesting, and hopefully educational ways to enjoy time out of doors with nature in this coming year.
-------------------------------------------------------
1st Jan 2016 - 1.35 miles - 11 species
Total Count: 1.35 miles - 11 species
I dare say getting up early wasn't at the top of the to-do list for many people this morning, after the late night and potentially ... merry gatherings. But work doesn't sleep so I was up early and out before first light to continue the deer management work around the woodlands I manage. Next week I'll be back in the woods for a few days carrying on with the coppicing work and the knowledge that there are a few less teeth to nibble my future harvest will be satisfying.
It was a beautiful day, the first proper frost of the winter. Hovering around freezing with an as-good-as-clear sky gradually blueing I made my way to my piece of the ground having dropped off my fellow stalkers at predetermined positions. Because of time constraints it was a bit of a rushed trip but a needed one none the less, by the time I got where I was going and kitted up I needed to be back at the car in 50 minutes or so, usually these trips have more like 3 hours set aside. The first few hundred yards didn't reveal much - it seemed like nature might have been sleeping off celebrations from the night before as well.
 |
| Track for my walk / stalk this morning: out and back along the same route - when you have to cross numerous deep, steep sided ditches you only have so many options on routes! |
Eventually the wide open fields bisected by ditches started to come to life: Reed Buntings and Gold Finches flitted through the reeds and other remnant vegetation left along ditch edges while Field Fares, Pigeons, Gulls and corvids criss-crossed over head at varying heights on routes to various destinations. Finally I spotted a deer, a Chinese Water deer a long way off and heading away, no point following that one. 20 minutes out from the car and with only 25 minutes of walking time remaining I'd written off the deer management trip as a failure and chalked up the morning to just 'a nice time to be out'. As it happened I did come across a suitable cull animal and was able to harvest it just before I reached the deadline for turning around.
Whatever your opinion of this method for deer management, it provides me good opportunities to get out and about at times of day many prefer to spend in doors, or in bed! It is not about eradication or 'shooting anything that moves' - it is management, and it is required because of mans interference. It is also good exercise, my mere stroll this morning is nothing; clocking up more than 3 or 4 miles in an outing isn't unusual, and I've done more than 5 miles before now.
Today was a nice start to my 10002 challenge though, and a beautiful day to start the year. While I saw many more species during the course of the day than the 11 I've listed many were from the car and as such off limits for the count. If my prime purpose had been recording I think 30 or 40 could have been noted but I am up above the daily required average for now and happy to start steady so I don't burn out too soon! I hope you enjoy keeping tabs through the coming year on my recording and walking efforts (I'll add a dedicated page to the blog to allow anyone interested to keep up to date), alongside my (hopefully) regular reports on my local patch and my woodland management work.
Thanks for reading,
Richard
No comments:
Post a Comment