Flyladyphotography By Wendy Cooper

  Well, just where has this year gone? It seems to have gone by in a flash!   I decided to have a browse back through my nature diary and at first, I thought I'd had a 'quiet' year on the wildlife front, however as I refreshed my memory, I found I'd added nine new birds to my life list as well as a few more insects to my invertebrates list.  I don't keep an annual list, simply a life list of all the species I get to encounter, so I was pleasantly suprised!   ( I have tried to summarise by month and I have been hard pushed to leave things out, so where there are phrases highlighted, I have linked back to previous blogs for more detail.  I have also put together a selection of favourite sightings into an album over on Flickr in date order - there is a link at the end of the blog if you wish to pop over there and have a pictorial wander through my year! )   2016 started with a very mild winter and on my local patch many of the plants I don't usually see until

  Well this week has finally seen the temperatures drop with the arrival of single figures and even the first frost. The arrival of autumn this year, certainly on my home patch, has been a little muddled, with plenty of sightings of summer species remaining out and about for far longer than I recall in recent years; for much of September and October, it was at least mild, if not positively summery on many days and only really began to cool down in the later weeks of October.   In September and October, after the fields had been harvested, I had a few wanders on my local patch to see what was still about.  One morning in mid September, I was up at dawn, as I knew there was a good chance of it being bright, but on the misty side. I also had a fancy to see 'who' was about that early!  I took a stroll along the woodland margin and I could hear the birds singing, however, they were well undercover in lush foliage, it was a real mix of colours, with the burdock seed heads in shades