Looking Back, Looking Forward

So, the moth trap has been out. I'm pretty sure it hasn't previously seen any action in December, but a vague Met Office mention of incoming air from 'the Tropics' tempted me. Friday night: zero moths; Saturday night: five moths...

Angle Shades is always welcome. Migrant? I really don't know.

A furry little December Moth, enjoying its NQS debut. There were two of these.

The other two moths were Epiphyas postvittana, or Light Brown Apple Moth; a familiar, everyday micro.

No longer having a Twitter account means I am completely out of the loop, moth news-wise, and have no idea whether migrants have been dropping in from warm parts afar. Nevertheless, I'll put the trap out again tonight. I guess there might be a chance.

I'm currently deep into some very overdue DIY at home, and a recent garage deck-clearing operation to make some work space saw me stow all my mothy paraphernalia until next season. It hadn't seen any use for several weeks, so I've surprised myself somewhat by getting it out again. And doing so has got me thinking about how my second - but first full - year of mothing went. Pretty well, I reckon. Not the migrant-fest of 2022, but still some cracking moths, including a few Dorset scarcities (rarities?) like Tissue and Royal Mantle, as well as my first Clifden Nonpareils, Lime Hawk-moth, etc. I suppose any normal blog would do a mothy review of the year, but I don't think that will happen here. There was a time when I kept a careful tally of the number of species recorded, how many were new for the garden and/or year...but, well, I kind of let it slip.

Looking forward to next year, hopefully there will still be lots of trap deployment, but maybe a more cherry-picking approach to its contents. I foresee a lot less counting.

Bird-wise, yesterday's postal delivery gave me good reason to do a bit of 'looking back'...

256 enormous pages.

Back in the day, the arrival of a shiny new county bird report was a big deal for me. At that time it would have been the London Bird Report. Obviously I would check for entries with the initials GMH attached - in the early years there were quite a few of those - and review any sections I had written. Then I would pretty much devour it from cover to cover. Forty years on, everything is a bit more low-key. Don't get me wrong - the 2022 Dorset Bird Report is an amazing publication. Clearly, a load of hard work went into the production of this tome, but none of it was mine. My name appears occasionally (Barred Warbler and Leach's Petrel records for example) but my contribution was otherwise minimal. I think even my 2022 records were automatically picked up from eBird entries.

Impressed as I am with this fine volume, I shan't be sitting down to read it from cover to cover. I shall browse and dabble, no doubt raising a surprised eyebrow from time to time or sighing at some depressing statistic of loss. Unlike my younger self, I no longer feel involved in the county-level birding scene, but more an outsider looking in. Interested, but not invested.

Looking forward, birding in 2024 will undoubtedly revert to a boundary-free approach. It will be 99% local, but no 'patch' as such, or at least nothing I could in good conscience call a patch.

Casting an eye over what I've written here, I realise some of it reads a bit like something from a 'review of the year' post. That's not intentional, but I wonder if I'm subconsciously wishing the calendar forward two weeks!