2026 Wildlife Resolutions
My 20 Wildlife Resolutions for 2026
- Start a nature journal – Check, this blog is my new online nature journal
- Read 12 books about invertebrates – I still have a whole stack waiting, so this shouldn’t be a problem. At the moment I am reading The Garden Jungle by Dave Goulson
- Join a citizen science project – the European Stag Beetle Monitoring Network is a logical choice, but I may come across other interesting projects
- Provide more nesting habitat for pollinators and other invertebrates
- Publish a PDF zine every quarter
- Create a wildlife pond – something I already wanted to do last year, but never got around to. I mean more a shallow pool for amphibians, not a fish pond
- Publish an article in one of the better-known nature magazines
- Find and identify 250 different beetle species – preferably in my own garden
- Publish the observation data on iNaturalist
- Start a breeding project for dung beetles – there will be several blog-posts about this
- Visit the local natural history museum
- Get Rumba and Jinx (two of my dogs) ready for tracking additional species of bio-indicator beetles – at the moment we are working on stag beetles and rhino beetles, but I want to expand this with a few more species
- Find a velvet spider (Eresidae) – preferably a male, of course
- Reach 500 on my pan-species list of species that can be found in the garden
- Find 3 species of wild orchids
- Figure out whether the owl that has been hanging around here for a year is a short-eared owl or a tawny owl
- Go on a night walk at least once a month to observe nocturnal life
- Point the wildlife camera at a different corner of the garden every week
- Collect and plant seeds from local trees, shrubs, and flowers
- Expand the “dog garden” so the dogs have more space to run, while at the same time making this part of the garden insect-friendly