I’m writing this post on New Years Eve sitting in a cottage just a few hundred metres back from the north-west Devon coast. That distance is definitely a good thing as there is a storm outside (well guts of between 50 and 60mph) and the sea looked pretty threatening, even this far away.

2024 has been been another great year in my exploration of nature, both at home and much further away. It has also been a very fast moving one – it really does seem to have gone in a blink of an eye, especially the months since the end of summer. I’m really not sure where the time has gone.

As is now becoming traditional in my life, the year started down in Devon as it is now finishing. We then had five months to wait until a first longer trip away from home. In between, we did have a short winter trip to Norfolk and visited many of the nature reserves in our area and further east.

That first trip, in May, was to Northumberland, staying for a week in Bamburgh. The highlights of that holiday were trips to the Farne Islands and out to the Isle of May, continuing our ‘quest’ to visit the islands around the UK.

With the summer came a trip to Sweden, which is also now getting back into an annual routine. We spent that week travelling what are now well known wildlife spots, canoeing and grilling sausages on open fires.

Unfortunately, one routine was broken this year as I had to cancel my late-August trip to RSPB Ramsey Island. However, this did enable me to do a first bit of formal volunteering locally with two days working with the Bedfordshire, Cambridgeshire & Northamptonshire Wildlife Trust.

Then, in November we had the biggest trip of the year with a two-week exploration of the Andes and Amazonian Rainforest of Ecuador. I’ve put some blog posts about this trip already but there will be more to come.

The trip to South America helped to make this a record-breaking year for me wildlife-wise. I have seen seen 475 species of bird and 54 species of mammal in the calendar year. The former breaks my bird record by 175!

I added one new bird to my life list in the UK (waxwing) and I saw 316 new birds for my life list in Ecuador. I am now much closer to my current target of 1,000 birds with the trip to Ecuador taking my current total to 821.

Back to the weather; the first part of the year was extremely wet being part of the wettest 12 months and 18 months on record. The poor weather continued into June but we then had a surprisingly good summer. This good weather dried out the land and enabled me to do a lot of off-road cycling around my home in rural Northamptonshire which I loved immensely. The weather then got back to its old pattern with some very heavy rain and in late November we were almost cut off in our village by flooded roads.

Signing off for 2024, it’s been a great year with many brilliant memories. It does make me reflect just how grateful I am to live in a rural area with easy access to the countryside and a great range of nature sites. It also reminds me just how fortunate I am to be able to travel around the UK and much further to see the best of the wild. That gratitude comes with a continuing recognition that so much of that nature and wildness is threatened and more action is needed to protect and revive it.

I should just say thanks to the small group of followers who read my Daft Mumblings (your numbers actually jumped up a bit on 2024!)

I’ll finish with a few photo highlights of the year…