Post 375 - New Year of Nature Plans

Fox Glove Covert - wonderful to be greeted by a rainbow
one of the few sunny spells we've lately.

Hey everyone. Before I start I just want to say I hope you had a very merry Christmas (if you celebrate that sort of thing). It is the 375th post today and as it's almost the New Year (and that it's a small milestone) I thought I would run through a few of my New Year of Nature Plans. I've been thinking about this a lot and as it's not that far away so I thought I would publish my thoughts before I changed my mind. ;-).

The wildlife is very safe here!

Well, the first of my plans is to try to go to every single Yorkshire Nature Reserve. That itself is a very hard challenge as Yorkshire is quite big but I am going to try and do it in one year. I kind of think it's impossible but we're going try for it, I'll start with North Yorkshire first and the Wildlife Trust reserves mainly but will try and go to any others I find too. The good thing about this challenge is both the places that we're going to find during this as well as the amount of both birds, insects and any other animals.

I have actually started on this already a bit when I went to a great reserve called Foxglove Covert. It was a little hard to get into because of the facts that a lot of the roads to get there were closed due to the A1 being upgraded. It was also hard to get into as there was a man with a machine gun in front of the gates. No, don't worry it wasn't anything bad. It was just that this particular nature reserve happened to be in the middle of an army base. Obviously we couldn't get any pictures of the actual base but we did get some pictures of the reserve and of the gates to the nature reserve itself.

Lichens lich it here!

I wasn't there long as it took longer to get to than we thought and as we were on our way to do a bit of food shopping ready for Christmas. But while I was there I did manage to see some fantastic lichens, jelly fungus, chaffinches and a Great Spotted Woodpecker. Look out for a post on some of these soon.

A white jelly fungus

My other challenge is also quite difficult, but I hope possible with luck. I'm going to try and find as many, maybe all, Red List bird species in the UK. It's quite hard as there will be a little bit of travelling involved as well as the luck involved in seeing these birds wherever they are. So, the same twist as my first challenge, do it in one year. Today me and my Dad were making a list of the different birds on the UK list that I have seen, both in general and in our Garden. We found out I'd seen 35 different bird species in our garden and over 140 in general. I'm not 100% sure how many of these were Red List Species so I'll have to either look them up or find them again.

And an orange one!

I did get a bit of a start on this too as I was at Nosterfield just before Christmas and there were Lapwings, Curlews and Pochards there. There's quite a few House Sparrows in my garden and I think I'll make them a special nest box too. Watch out for posts on some of these soon.

Wish me luck!

So, you may notice (if you visited this post within the few days it was available) that there is a small poll on the right hand side of the page. It basically just asks you if you would rather see me cover cover one of my plans more than the other so if you could vote on it just to give me some sort of guidance that would be great. :-)

I hope you enjoyed hearing about my New Year of Nature Plans, I hope they give me lots of blog topics to cover as well as new places and species to see.

Z.