drplokta

So, back in 2007 I spent the year seeing how many different species of vertebrate (excluding fish) and butterfly I could spot around Rotherhithe, in inner London. And I scored 71.

Since I now live somewhere completely different, I'll try the same again for 2014 and see how I get on. The ground rules (lightly edited from last time) are:

The area is everything in walking distance of home.
Air-breathing vertebrates and butterflies only. Fish are too dull and hard to see, and invertebrates are too numerous and hard to identify. Amphibians at a non-air-breathing stage count, but will probably also be hard to identify.
Domesticated animals, including homo sapiens, don't count, but escaped or released animals do (e.g. pheasants).
Dead animals don't count, even though that's the only way I'm likely to find a hedgehog.
Photos to be provided where possible, but it still counts if I can't get a photo.
Hearing but not seeing does not count. (So much for scoring any owls.)
Updates to be posted behind a cut tag for the benefit of those people who don't want to download large numbers of blurry thumbnails.
Herring gulls, lesser black-backed gulls, yellow-legged gulls and Caspian gulls are different species. Whether or not I can tell the difference is another matter.

As before, here's a poll for you to guess how many I'll see. A few points to bear in mind:

I'm now in the middle of the Kent countryside
But farmland is actually not very biodiverse, less so than suburbia
But there's plenty of woodland nearby as well, and we have a big garden now
But there's no open water, so a lot less waterfowl and seagulls than last time
And I'll mostly be accompanied by a large and boisterous carnivore who will scare off some of the wildlife

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