if you like this, you'll love....

As well as our year long patchwork challenge, there are a few other very worthy initiatives that might interest patch birders.

Mark Reeders Foot It runs through January and is based upon, as the name suggests, the number of birds that can be seen on foot from home. Hopefully Mark will be along soon to tell us a bit more about it but in the meantime you can find details here

Also running in 2013 is this pan-listing challenge This is a challenge to record 1000 species of, well, anything, within a 1 km square. As it says on the blog, ' There's nothing like a bit of friendly competition and camaraderie to spur one along' so if you need an excuse to start looking at the wider wildlife around you, perhaps this is the way to start. I'm sure the good men at the blog will be able to point you in the right direction regarding ID help for all those little creepy crawlies.

Like the patchwork challenge, Mark is encouraging all taking part to submit data to birdtrack - and of course, I'm sure birdtrack would be very grateful for bird data from folk taking part in 1000 for 1KSQ. Perhaps even more worthwhile would be recarding data for all the other bits and bobs you find wriggling under stones - most of which must be relatively data poor. I'm not in a position to tell you what to do with these records but again, I'm sure that the guys at the blog would be happy to oblige!

Lets hope that between the three of us we can make a significant contribution to data recording in 2013. I'll certainly be plugging all of my bird data in - but I may well take a bit more notice of whats right under my nose too.