Kategori: English

Now that a half-warm winter with fog and the occasional rain is ruling this week, I took the time to once more make a plan for the immediate future.

As I enjoy writing these blogposts, I try to add writing them to my weekly plan. Time is rather limited with family, work, a house and a garden. But I do have possibilities as long as I pay attention to how I spent my days, and why.

I made an effort this week to sketch out my plans for 2025 (and beyond?), drawing on my many attempts from the previous many years of doing the same. The older I get, the more realistic I might become, so if I just keep trying I should do it right at some point.

In 2025, I’d like to concentrate on these blogposts, on totally rebuilding my homepage and at the same time keeping more or less the same birding- and nature activities as the last few years.

There is often a feeling of slight frustration during the year, as it is hard to keep up with all the pictures, lists, discoveries, plans, new species and other good finds. Especially during the long summer days, where it is very tempting to go birding and looking for insects more than once a day. I plan to work with my observations and pictures and the such during this time, but new things come rolling in, pushing my good intentions away.

To increase my overview of the amount of data, ideas and experiences, and to plan with them to the best of my abilities and time available, I decided to organise all the tabs of my browser (by turning them into bookmarks) and order and clean my todoist, by implementing the so-called Eisenhower Matrix. This should order my to-do’s according to the plans and priorities I just made for myself.

Because the best way to use the time I have is to be prepared for it. Planning the next day in the evening saves a lot of time, and having a list of tasks that is well pruned and ready will, hopefully, do wonders.
I opted for a simple priority-system where, for example, priority 1 is for the important and urgent tasks. As long as I review this system regularly, this should help me to get started as soon as I have a possibility.

Let’s hope it works well for me.

Luckily, there was also an opportunity this week to go for a short trip with my daughter to an area along the motorway that is kept rather wet and relatively untouched to preserve the archaeological findings in the ground. We walked and chatted about nature, admiring the surroundings and stamping on the ice on the puddles. And we even saw a few birds, like the one Great Egret that landed in the top of a tree.
It was a wonderful and revitalising walk.

The garden birding mainly produces large groups of common birds. This week I counted groups of in total 520 Wood Pigeons, and a group of about 350 Rook and 150 Jackdaws flying over. The noise is wonderful, and as so often, I was so thrilled by it that I almost forgot to count them again.

Podcast SOVON about Great Tit

Please note that the actual podcast is in Dutch.

Vogelverhalen 21: De Koolmees by Sovon Vogelonderzoek NederlandSovon Vogelonderzoek Nederland

SOVON (A dutch bird-data organisation – Wiki in english) has a podcast (in Dutch) called Vogelverhalen (Birdstories). Each episode is about a different bird species. I was only my second episode I heard, but I found it very interesting to zoom in on a bird specie and getting to know the researches that are going on and, in this case, have been going on since 1955.

The main part of the podcast focuses on 2 research programs of the Netherlands Institute of Ecology involving great tits.

The first part of the podcast is an interview with prof. dr. Kees van Oers and is about the difference in personalities of -in this case- great tits.

Great tits are doing well as captive birds, and it has even been possible to work with many generations of these birds, enabling research in genetics and behaviour. As a main part of the research, great tits are put in a room they haven’t seen before and the birds will start to explore the new environment. They will immediately look for food, as they always do, but the way they tackle the new situation is different for each individual. Some react very quickly and start fanatically looking for food, while others carefully look around first. The research focused on the question whether the difference in behaviour has a genetic background or whether it perhaps is a reaction to their surroundings and other more immediate circumstances. The result of the investigation so far (with 4 generations and 25 years of research) is that both have an about equal influence on the behaviour of the individual bird.

The next question could be about climate change. How will this difference in personalities effect the great tit population in a changing world? Will some do better, and if so, which ones and why?

Trivia: The yellow colour of the Great Tit is a result of eating green caterpillars. The captured birds lose their yellow colour and those feathers turn grey. This change in colour can also happen in natural environments – f.ex. with those that are born late and who therefore can’t eat as many caterpillars as the earlier birds. This will however not be as clearly as with the captured birds.

The second part is an interview with Prof. dr. Marcel Visser who researches captured and wild great tits for their seasonal timing – when do they start nesting and how do they calculate what the best moment in time is. The whole process of laying eggs and letting them hatch takes nearly a month. Food should be abundant after that month for the young birds to thrive and survive. As temperature plays a key part in the process of deciding when to start laying eggs, climate change – and the consequences of it – will play a vital role in the future success of the great tit population. The research concentrates on captured birds and birds living in the wild on 4 locations in the Netherlands with different habitats. Those locations have been monitored since 1955. Since the last part of the 1990ties the research started to concentrate on the effects of climate change as well. It turned out that there is a difference in timing of adaptation to climate change between caterpillars, trees and great tits in the Dutch areas.

The Weasel

I was happy to see a weasel this week in our wild garden. I had seen it a couple of times in November 2022, and sort of assumed that it -or its family – was still there. But only now I saw it again, when it came a couple of times from underneath some bushes while I was birding in the garden. There is a bird feeder in those bushes with spillings falling on the ground. And that day there was a boil of water that was not frozen, unlike the other places with water in the garden.

A weasel is most easily distinguished from a stoat by its size and by the tip of the tail. A weasel has a short tail without a black tip, a stoat a long tail with a black tip.
It was therefore nice to have a picture where the (quick moving) animal showed its tail so clearly.

Notes

• Bookmark manager: I spent some time this week trying to find a good bookmark manager, but I didn’t find one. Then I realised that the Firefox browsers bookmark abilities work very well.

• A ruined birding location: Despite the rain and wind, I went on my first walk of ’25 today. Only to see that, at my absolute favourite birding place, the 2 to 3 meter thick row of shrubbery and small trees has been trimmed down to 20 cm high with 0,4 meter left untouched.
  I wanted to spend a lot of time in that rather large area this summer. But it will take some 6 years before it starts to remind me of how it was.
  It couldn’t be happy there today, but who knows what comes out of it. The view is great now 🙁 but hopefully the owner will let it grow again.
• Deep work tip: Prepare for your next day and give yourself a task to start with. That works wonders for me, saving me a lot of time procrastinating, doubting and wondering what to do.

With the rain bashing the window overlooking the garden, the holiday slowly nearing its end and a new year starting, it is time to make plans for the next year.

The last half of 2024 I started to make up my mind about how I want to spend my time.
My problem has always been that I feel that there isn’t enough time to spend on all my interests, dreams and wishes. Starting with playing chess as a young man, to painting landscapes for many years and writing whenever I am in the mood throughout my life, I build up an interest in many things. I can easily name 10 things more I would like to do.

But in the last 10 years, this probably meant that I didn’t really choose the one thing I wanted to concentrate on. And with my attention being spread out throughout the week, my personal space being filled with stuff from this or that interest, and having a job and family, this actually meant that I sometimes can feel lost in time. Both time on the clock and times long gone.

The plan that has been taking shape for the last 6 months is very simple: Just concentrate on what I am doing now and clean up the rest. Because no matter what I tried, I always went birding, looking for insects or checking birding apps or sites anyway. So I might as well give in: I will concentrate on Birding and nature around me as THE thing I do besides family and work. And I will try my best to do it as “Deep Work”. That is, as Ali Abdaal explains the key points of Carl Newport’s concept. Deep work is focused work where you don’t want to be disturbed. And that you can do for, at the most, 4 hours.
As Carl Newport puts it:

“the act of focusing without distraction on a cognitively demanding task.”

Deep work also means chasing the goals that are most meaningful. Work that brings us closer to our goal.

In my case, I find that I am at my best, and that I have an opportunity to concentrate on Birding and nature, in the mornings. Some days I even might have 4 hours for that.
And -on a sidenote – I actually think I need time spent on nature to mentally function well in the other parts of life.

So, there you are. My intentions for 2025 and some Todo’s for Deep work Birding and Nature:

• Create a deep work environment and aim for the best in 4 hours.
  • Time block my mornings in my Calendar (no deep work on weekends and during holidays).
  • Have a plan ready at the start of my day (as not to lose time planning and doubting).
  • Clean up my working space and only allow things related to Nature.
  • Organise my computer.
    • Clean up my browser tabs and organise bookmarks.
    • Organise an RSS reader for goal orientated reading
    • Organise Obsidian (big task ahead!)
    • Create relevant reading list in Mastodon.
• Write on my blog to document outcome and track progress.