If you have been reading my articles over the last 12 months or so you will know that most of my birdwatching has been centred almost exclusively on my local patch of Ronkswood Local Nature Reserve and the adjoining former Tolladine Golf Course.

This has been due in part to the various Covid restrictions but more a desire to fully record a new local patch.

You will have also read about the birds I have seen and photographed, so going into a lot of detail is unnecessary regarding this aspect of my birding year.

I will tell you that I have recorded 64 species on the patch with 21 of those breeding. Which, for an area of grassland and hedgerows with no open water nor an obvious migration route nearby, I don’t think is too shabby.

There is also a colony of marbled white butterflies on the south facing slopes at Darwin Field on the former golf course.

While I’m on the subject of numbers of this, numbers of that; for the last two years I have taken part in Birdwatching Magazine’s #My200BirdYear, a self-explanatory, informal, personal challenge from the magazine to birdwatchers to try to record at least 200 species in a year.

Knowing just how much birdwatchers love to compile lists, this was an inspired idea. It is fair to say that I’ve not achieved that total yet.

In 2019 I managed 176 species and last year 112.

My life list stands at 268. It is quite depressing when I consider what my recent lists are missing; turtle dove, willow and marsh tits, tree sparrow, and the lesser spotted woodpecker. Birds I would consider common as I was growing up are now with populations under severe pressure through habitat loss.

And that brings me to the elephant not quite in the room, but on the near horizon. The pleasure I get from birdwatching on Tolladine’s old golf course is under threat from development.

Now I am perfectly aware that I may seem incredibly selfish and that I’m spoilt by having such a fantastic large open space on my doorstep and it’s only Darwin Field that is proposed to be developed.

But I think we all know it won’t stop at 50 houses, once permission is granted the floodgates will open to develop the rest of the site.

According to the developer we have an ‘over-supply’ of green space, apparently!

But with our birds, insects and mammals under such enormous pressure from loss of habitat; with the city committed to addressing the environment crisis and ‘rewilding’ being an important national initiative it is vitally important that we preserve every green space with currently have left, not only for wildlife, but for our mental health, and the city itself.

The soil of the golf course and Ronkswood Nature Reserve gets muddy, as anyone who walks up there will tell you, but it also soaks up a massive amount of rainwater. Now imagine where that rain will go if we concrete and tarmac over the golf course.

We should no longer be looking to destroy any seemingly empty, unused green space when we can upgrade and redevelop existing buildings and their associated infrastructure.

So, this year, I shall be continuing to record my local patch and hope and campaign; for great strides in nature conservation; for the protection of what we still have and for the beginnings of recovery for our threatened wildlife.