Being confined indoors by the weather has allowed me to start on a project that I have been planning for a long time, recording the flora and fauna that we have in the garden. Since we moved here I have kept a list of birds that I have seen but now I am expanding this to cover everything else.
Initially I am recording everything I can identify on an excel spreadsheet linked to a photograph and notes as to things were in relationship to plants etc. This will give me an overview of the ecology and biodiversity of the garden as I will see the relationships between organisms. I have got various bits of equipment for collecting and identifying insects etc and obviously everything collected will be unharmed and released as soon as possible where it was collected.
I am also going back through my photographic archive and adding species from that to my database. One of the great advantages of this is that digital photos are time stamped so I know precisely when they were taken.
Then starting on new years day I will start recording the date at which I first see each species I have listed to form an ongoing record of the phenology (phenology is the recording of date, climate etc as opposed to phrenology which is a psuedoscience measuring lumps an bumps on peoples heads!) of the garden. Hopefully over the years I will be able to see trends appearing.
The other thing I want to start doing (again) is drawing specimens from the garden. When I did my degree we had to draw specimens and I really enjoyed it, it was very disciplined unlike the art I produce now so I need to get back into practice.
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