New Year, new project...

After a quiet evening, we toasted the New Year with a shot of home-made mandarin and vanilla vodka, surrounded by a barrage of bangs, crackles and pops, though very few fireworks were actually visible.

This morning Pete and I started our new project for 2014 - a thorough wildlife survey of the garden. We will have lived here twenty years by the time 2014 ends, and although over the years we've recorded much of the wildlife, particularly through regular moth-trapping, we've never had a really focussed effort on all groups. This year we're aiming to record over one thousand species from our patch of suburban wilderness.

We only had about an hour of recording time before the rain began, but have already recorded over 150 species including 80 higher plants (only those that self-seed and have sustainable populations are being counted), 15 mosses, a dozen birds and an assortment of millipedes, slugs and other invertebrates. We're already wondering whether 1000 species may not be ambitious enough!

As the weather was so awful I didn't take any photographs outside, but used my new extension tubes to get a close-up view of the capsules of a tiny moss, Rhynchostegium murale, that's quite frequent on the lumps of oolitic limestone scattered over our garden. Maybe I should aim to photograph all the species we record during the year! On the other hand, perhaps not!!