Adios '20... Hello '21

So that's it, 2020 is officially done. And thank f*ck for that, I imagine a great many people will be saying. I reckon that I've gotten away very lightly with the whole covid thing, there are definitely worse places to be locked down than on the beautiful Trotternish Peninsular. A well-stocked shop and my beloved Uig Wood are both just a few minutes walk down the hill, my job remains fundamentally secure and I have buzzards, ravens and the occasional eagle overhead. Yep, there are definitely worse places to live and circumstances in which to find oneself. I'm very glad I no longer live in South London, covid or otherwise. 

Skye has escaped the coronavirus largely unscathed - one very notable exception being a nursing home which decided to draft in extra staff from Glasgow, quickly resulting in several elderly residents dying from it. In hindsight, possibly not the greatest managerial decision ever taken. For myself, I know one guy in Sussex who died of/with covid in the early days of it arriving in Britain, though his sons are fighting it being registered as the cause of death on his certificate, seeing as he was already seriously unwell and about to die anyway. And I lost a good friend just a few months back, he committed suicide due to various changes of circumstance brought about due to the coronavirus. I miss both of these men, and it saddens me that I never said goodbye to either of them. But in the grand scheme of things, I know that 2020 could have been a lot worse for me than it actually was. I have the natural world to help keep me sane, a fact that has only become increasingly clear to me over the course of the last few months. I've written more on that elsewhere.

I'm resisting the urge to compose the traditional 'end of year round up' thing that all wildlife bloggers seem compelled to do. Frankly I'm too knackered and frazzled to bother, and far too keen to make a start on the 2021 craziness that I've been planning for weeks now. 2020 is behind us, probably a good thing too, and I'm looking ahead now.

That's right, dear reader. I have a new Challenge for 2021 and a new  Blog to document the adventures and mishaps I encounter along the way. I shall of course be keeping this Skye's the Limit blog going too, it's been running for slightly over four years now and I've no plans to either ditch it or stop adding to it. 

If you look at the tabs below the banner pic at the top of this page, you'll notice there's one that says 2021 Challenge. Click on that and you shall be magically transported to the new Blog. Who knows what you may find there...

Right, I'm gonna try and get my head down (don't ask!) for a couple of hours before it all kicks off. Have a great New Year everybody, fingers crossed this bastard covid does one sometime soon and we can start rebuilding a semblance of normality once more. 

Random pic of a place I like. This is Loch Cill Chriosd, site of the immature Moorhen I successfully twitched a few weeks back. It's the first one to be reported on Skye since I moved here. Had to be done.