Just a very brief post, firstly to say thank you to everybody who has taken the time to read this blog throughout the year. I definitely should have blogged more often, I should also have taken more time to make the posts a bit more interesting and colourful, but you stuck with it and for that I am grateful.
Now, about that Challenge between The Ghost and myself....
I've had my nose in the Backlog Box for most of the past twelve evenings or so, desperately hoping to maintain my lead over The Ghost. A few days ago he told me he had overtaken my fly tally and was now working at his beetles. I continued my backlog box trawl, adding yet more species to my own diptera tally. Yesterday, the last day of the year, I didn't bother. I'd simply had enough, time to call it quits. Surely the handful of extra species I might be able to glean from it wouldn't make any odds anyway.
My 2020 beetle tally is 168 species. My diptera tally is 247 species, combined that totals 415 species. The Ghost sent me his final update shortly after midnight last night. 255 diptera and 166 beetles, which is 422 species. Damnit, why oh why didn't I do that one final backlog trawl? So yeah, the tortoise has indeed beaten the hare, just as he promised he would. The bloody-minded fiend, haha! And yes, as promised I will be presenting him with a six pack of V, his medicine as he calls it, as reward for winning our challenge. Bless him, he really must have put some serious effort into those beetles, he was absolutely miles behind me on those. As I say, sheer bloody-mindedness.
So that's it folks, 2020 is done and this blog is now officially closed. As requested, I shall leave it up online, at least until my Home Blog becomes too full of tabs to these annual blogs and I have a cull.
Oh, except to say that The Ghost has challenged me for 2021 too. And ridiculously I have accepted. Once a fool, always a fool... I'm still chasing diptera in 2021, but for the first time ever I'm also concentrating on spiders. I have no idea how many species I will find in the year. Is a hundred species a realistic target? I actually have no clue, this will be one big learning curve for me. The Ghost is rather keen on his bugs, and so our new challenge is another head to head with the tallies - spiders for me and homopteran hoppers for him. There are many more spider species in Britain than there are hoppers, but the bulk of them occur in the warmer south of Britain and I'm pretty clueless on the ones that do occur up here. It could be a fair challenge, or I could be setting myself up for another defeat. In truth I don't think either one of us knows how the forthcoming year is going to pan out.
If you've enjoyed this blog and would maybe like to keep tabs on my 2021 Spiders and Flies Challenge, please visit www.spiderflies.blogspot.com and I look forward to your company over there too. If you've linked this site to your own blog, could you maybe replace it with the new one, should you feel so inclined.
Cheers for now folks!
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