Nature Watch, with Ron Freethy

AS we said goodbye to the year 2000, I sat down over Christmas to make my list of my own favourite memories.

I remember one of the few hot days of June when I visited Scotland to enjoy the sights and sounds of a seabird colony just off the east coast.

Here I spent hours watching colonies of puffins with the youngsters just beginning to venture out from the safety of their nesting holes, which are usually pinched from rabbits.

On occasions, however, puffins will scrape out their own burrows using their stout colourful bills and their feet.

Puffins are a bit clumsy on land, and even in flight, but they are a bit like penguins in the sense that they are wonderful swimmers.

Puffns belong to a family of birds called auks and this family only occurs in the northern hemisphere. Penguins, on the other hand, only occur in the southern hemisphere.

The fact that auks and penguins are quite similar to look at is no accident because both have adapted to the same conditions.

Biologists call this an example of convergent evolution but you and I might call it common sense.

Both auks and penguins have plenty of blubber to keep them warm and both spend almost all their life at sea and only come to land to breed.

My second memory of the year 2000 concerns the wet weather. On one September morning the rain fell in torrents, as had been the case for days on end. I decided to go out when the rain relented.

In a hedgerow at Pleasington, Blackburn, rowan berries were being feasted upon by thrushes, blackbirds and woodpigeons. Hungry starlings were surprisingly acrobatic as they gorged themselves.

As the light began to fade, I watched a fox feeding on the first of the blackberries and proving that, although this animal is mainly a carnivore, its diet is more varied than is often suggested.

My third memory of the year 2000 took me once more to Scotland and, after yet another night of heavy rain in November, I was up on the high hills.

There standing above the snowline was a magnificent red deer stag.

In East Lancashire the red deer have long since vanished but we do have a healthy population of roe deer which a few years ago were all but extinct.

Reading through our "spy" records, I see that in the year just ended there have been more than 200 sightings of roe deer and these have been spread throughout our area.

There have also been more records than usual of breeding oyster catchers.

This species can no longer be regarded as a sea bird.

It has moved up the coast following the river valleys, which are now becoming ever cleaner.

The year 2000 has been one of great optimism for naturalists, despite the very wet autumn.

Let us hope that the year 2001 gives us more sunshine and that the Nature Spy column will have more impressive sightings than in the year 2000.

A magnificent red deer stag seen in Scotland. In East Lancashire the red deer have long since vanished but we have a healthy population of roe deer which a few years ago were all but extinct