drplokta

1. Stick the earth spike in the ground
   
2. Loop the metal bit over the fence
   
3. Squint at the LED in the bright sunlight
   
4. Put your hand over the LED to shade it enough to see if it's flashing
   
5. Get your hand zapped with 3,000 volts
   
6. The fence is working

1. The area is everything in walking distance of home.
   
2. 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.
   
3. Domesticated animals, including homo sapiens, don't count, but escaped or released animals do (e.g. pheasants).
   
4. Dead animals don't count, even though that's the only way I'm likely to find a hedgehog.
   
5. Photos to be provided where possible, but it still counts if I can't get a photo.
   
6. Hearing but not seeing does not count. (So much for scoring any owls.)
   
7. 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.
   
8. 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.
   

• 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
  

But topics exhaust themselves and, at the last, I myself brought the talk round to the Fourth Dimension. We were sauntering along the forgotten valley that lies between Hardves and Stelling Minnis; we had been silent for several minutes. For me, at least, the silence was pregnant with the undefinable emotions that, at times, run in currents between man and woman. The sun was getting low and it was shadowy in those shrouded hollows. I laughed at some thought, I forget what, and then began to badger her with questions. I tried to exhaust the possibilities of the Dimensionist idea, made grotesque suggestions. I said: And when a great many of you have been crowded out of the Dimension and invaded the earth you will do so and so? something preposterous and ironical. She coldly dissented, and at once the irony appeared as gross as the jocularity of a commercial traveller. Sometimes she signified: Yes, that is what we shall do; signified it without speaking?by some gesture perhaps, I hardly know what. There was something impressive?something almost regal?in this manner of hers; it was rather frightening in those lonely places, which were so forgotten, so gray, so closed in. There was something of the past world about the hanging woods, the little veils of unmoving mist?as if time did not exist in those furrows of the great world; and one was so absolutely alone; anything might have happened. I grew weary of the sound of my tongue. But when I wanted to cease, I found she had on me the effect of some incredible stimulant.