Intro & Summary

 It's tricky to provide a splash page in Blogger so for new readers I'll try to keep this to the fore (welcome).

This is a blog that I started way back when I first became (seriously) interested in birds and local wildlife, in the early 2000s. I was watching my son play football in Ramsgate and was distracted by some bright green, noisy birds. A little research told me that :

• they are rose-ringed parakeets, and
• the internet held a thriving birding community hosted by a forum known as Planet Thanet.

Living just south of Thanet, I was able to piggy-back their sightings, views and arguments and quickly learned a lot about birds to complement what I had learned in my youth. I also learned to steer clear of obsessions about loafing larids and autumn leaf warblers.

I directed my interest at my local area, and specifically the Kingsdown rifle range which appears occasionally in the blog. On the downs and cliffs between Kingsdown and St. Margaret's I met a loose team of locals named the Bockhill Birders who took bird identification to new heights, literally in the case of confidently naming passerines flying high above our heads.

This area is bird-rich during migration periods but not so good in summer, so time was spent with butterflies and later with plants, which subsequently became my main fascination. As can be seen in the blog. 

So from about 2010 I spent more time looking down instead of up, and realised that where we live is a great place of many habitats - cliffs, chalk downland, arable (yes, an arable weed hotspot), dunes, marshes and woodlands. 

Contact with the vice-county botanical recorders has dragged me into plant recording, learning a huge amount very quickly, mostly about what I still don't know, and retirement has brought volunteer work with KWT and a local conservation group. Living the dream. With many thanks to those who have helped me along the way.