My 2026 patch

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My 2026 patch, a 1 mile radius from home

Around a year ago I returned to bird watching after a 5-6 year break. Time pressures of family life meant some of my other hobbies were unsustainable, and bird watching just fitted into my daily routine of walking my dog (Ollie). And a 1 mile radius includes all the circular (~3 mile) walks I can do from home within the hour.

The local 1 mile radius patch for 2026

I've had a great year in the local area, and this year have decided to try and document what lives in a passes through a new town / housing estate / and neighbouring village bordered by arable land in Southwest England in 2026.


Cranbrook

Cranbrook feels a fairly special place for nature for a new town, large sections of the town are flood plain, hence it can't be built on, and has become a Cranbrook Country Park and nature reserve. It's 35 hectares (and in the plans set to grow) and has a nice range of habitats, streams, lakes, ponds (including small reed beds), scrapes, vernal pools, scrub, meadows, well established hedgerows, and a scattering of mature trees (thousands of water loving trees have been planted to bolster these).

 
Cranbrook County Park in Summer

The housing estates and businesses around the part have gardens, flat roofs (for gulls) and many bat bricks, swift bricks etc... installed. There also feels like a good garden bird feeding operation on the go.

Rockbeare

Living on the eastern edge of Cranbrook, my patch also includes arable land (crops and grazing), and parkland around the village of Rockbeare and Rockbeare Manor. This includes some woodland areas, and farms with barns, and some sympathetically maintained fields /meadows with wide weedy margins maintained, and a church tower (which hosted Swifts in 2025).

Arable land around Rockbeare in winter

Percy Wakely Woodland in a dry summer



The aim of this blog

Here I'll attempt (and fail) to keep a roughly week-by-week diary of the things I see and the count for the year. I think a realistic number a species for the year could be in the 70-80 range...but we'll see. I'm not the only birder in this area, so where I get reports from others, I'll include these in the number too. 

The aim being to demonstrate nature does not require expensive travel to safaris in Africa. It's for us and around us all, even in a normal suburban setting on Southwest England.

 

Location: Rockbeare, Exeter EX5 2EQ, UK

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