Deer, Deer. Deer, Deer, Deer.

As you might have gathered from Lawrie's Blips our patch listing year has started again. Lawrie has even created a unit to measure comparitive listing success - the Bob Index or BI - named after last year's Champion Swilly Lister. As at tonight, Bob is on 91 species for the patch so far in 2012 and I'm on 66. This gives me a respectable BI of 0.725

Until today, that was very close to Lawrie's BI. Then he snuck in a cheeky Pintail and a few others, to end the day with a BI of 0.780!!

Am I down hearted? Nooo! It just adds to the fun.

Rebecca and I had a great circular walk on patch today. Whilst we dipped on the Whooper Swans and that bloody Pintail we did see eight Roe Deer. One was in the reedbed, two were on the fenceline above the lake and these five were out in the open, for a couple of minutes.

The sun shone, our breath froze, the ground crunched beneath our feet. A great day.

I've put some more photos from today on Flickr and no doubt will return to the great BI tussle in later blips. If, by the remotest of chances, you want to follow our progress, just go to BUBO.org and search for "Swillington Ings Year Lists for 2012".