Catching up with Gen Z

I am not sure when it was, but for a brief moment I am sure that I was caught up. I even went as far as to change the sub-heading thing on the front page, you know, the "Latterly.... whatever" thing that you might see if you visit these pages on an actual computer. Ha! Like that was ever going to last. Clearly it did not, and so earlier this year I found myself several months behind once again. I can assure you that this annoys me more than it annoys anyone else. 

I took my laptop to Burgundy a few weeks ago intending to make at least some headway. I did nothing. Well, not nothing, I visited a lot of wine-makers, went to quite a few restaurants and so on, but did I write a single word? I did not. When I had the following weekend at home I bashed out Milan and so that dealt with March, but of course we are now in June. Do you reckon I spent April, May and what has passed of June so far at home? Of course you don't. In fact I am writing this from Budapest, albeit that this is not a jolly; I am here for work, passing on my valuable thoughts to my team in Hungary, many of whom are barely older than my children. Putting to one side that I am a dinosaur that these poor people are having to endure, this is a lovely, lovely place, a glorious European capital city, and under new management as well. 

I thought I would use the opportunity to forge ahead, to get April wriiten up and done. Hmmm, nice thought but it hasn't entirely worked out like that. On Sunday night I went out for a couple of drinks after which I could not string a sentence together, and last night I worked for so long that I came back to the hotel and fell asleep immediately. Tonight then. Yes tonight I will definitely write about Italy. 

Yeah, about that. The thing is there has to be some preamble, some lack of direction, some totally unnecessary words that are completely irrelevant. Until that I can't start. This is them, you are reading them now. At least I haven't managed any birding that would otherwise get in the way - I had planned to get up early each day and hit the Gellert-Hegy but in a rush on Sunday morning and needing to leave the house in order not to miss the flight I could not find the travel bins. A child has borrowed them and not put them back, so I am in eastern Europe with no optics which is an utter travesty. Bloody kids. 

Talking of children and binoculars, barely a day goes past without some news story about Gen Z and birds. It is the new "thing" if you would believe it. I intend to cover this more as I now believe (and deep down I always knew it) that I have done my children an incredible service by insisting that they look at birds when they were young. The journalists are not making this up, I can confirm it first hand, my kids' eyes are wide open and receptive. For years they denied it, recanted it in fact, but you can't deny this kind of deep-seated childhood memory, and it is coming back. One of my children has an eBird account.....

The rise of the bots

Many years ago I attached a hit counter to this blog in order to track how many people visisted. Self aggrandisement in other words. Over the years my interest in it has waned, I vaguely recall 1 million, I have no recollection of 2 million or anything beyond that. All I know is that I write posts about my holidays and birding trips that sink into a deep, black hole from which they never re-emerge. The other day, bemoaning yet another wasted half hour, I noticed that the post in question had been read by 60 or so people, meh, but that the "day count" was in excess of 10,000. Not only that, but the historic day count was also at this level and even beyond. Huh?

I've written - since inception - around 2,500 posts. That's actually quite a lot when you think about it, especially as I generally have nothing whatsoever to say for months on end. But ten thousand views a day makes no sense at all. Every single post would need to be viewed four times day, every day. And allegedly this has been happening for weeks and months.

I sense a bot. Many bots. Anyhow, it is nice of the machines to be concerned about my self esteem - look!

The formatting is a bit suspect, but as someone who works with numbers every day I can tell you that this is just over five million hits. Wow. I must be amazing. I have no idea how this happens, but you can track it (if you are on a computer rather than a phone) somewhere on the right hand side of the page down the bottom. Looking back at the rudimentary things that Google provides in the background I can see that up until about September 2025 it was chugging along perfectly normally. Then something happened, and since then there has been steady increase of alleged views month on month, culminating in a whopping 370,000 in April of this year. The same April in which I published six posts, most of them about a trip to Arizona which - if the stats are to be believed - were viewed on average 250 times each. 1,500 vs 370,000. Right.

Can anyone explain this. Does anyone give a toss? I am actually a bit irritated that any hope I might have of understanding exactly who visits are completely obscured by this. Not that I care all that much, but you know how it is. Mirror mirror on the wall....

Most of my visitors come from Vietnam and Iraq. Of course they do. I tailor my blog specificaly to appeal to readers from these countries, just as I do for my legions of loyal fans in Bangladesh, Tunisia and Saudi Arabia. 

Honestly, what a joke. The only hint at what might be happening is given by the bottom line in the referring URLs section. A recent date showed that Google.com was responsible for 41 visits, and the blog itself (as I frequently link to old posts plus the history is down the right hand side) delivered 53. Meanwhile "Other" delivered 96k. Nice. No other information about "Other" is available, but I reckon he might be called Claude.

EDIT: 19 people have read this post at the time of this edit. 10,697 "people" visited the blog today.

Milano

Another month, another short break. I very nearly didn't bother with this one, it was in March and it is now June, and in any event is anyone really interested? No, but then I remembered I had taken quite a few photos, mainly of random people on the street, so I went and took a look and decided I would. It's not as if I have anything else to cover...although, breaking news, I did finally manage to find Cetti's Warbler on the patch the weekend before last. It took many visits to the Old Sewage Works, far more than I had hoped to make, but it is now on the list and I won't have to go back. Unless I want to listen to what is likely going to be a breeding Sedge Warbler. That in itself is exciting news as to my knowledge that has never happened on the patch before.

Anyway Milan. Another trip a deux, very nice. Once again we had no firm plans, we just walked and walked and walked. Across the whole city actually, from our hotel in the north to the Armani warehouses in the south where Mrs L went to an exhibition. Food great, wine great, cocktails superb, weather nice, people watching very interesting - the world had converged on Milan that weekend, in particular some kind of OnePiece launch event so there were loads of people wearing straw boaters. There were also impromptu fashion shoots happening in the street. One minute you were walking along minding your own business, the next the pavement had become a catwalk and you were undesired, encouraged to get out of the way even, so that six foot women in three foot boots could swoosh past. I guess this is all part of what makes Milan Milan. Lovely place, our second visit and it won't be our last.

The Vertical Forest project in central Milan, close to where we were staying.

Wildlife segment, now on to people....

The selfie, checking of said selfie, and retaking of the selfie

Everyone is on their phones constantly

See?

What? What?!!

Morocco again, but calm

Sticking with the theme of grown-up non-birding holidays, a few weeks after the weekend in Lisbon Mrs L and I went to Morocco. For many years Mrs L was not keen on Morocco, even after my multiple trips, but I kept at it, showed her photos of Wheatears the Atlas Mountains , Berber life, the deserts and the towns, and finally she came around. But it was not to be a birding holiday. Fine. Much as I wanted to take her all the way east to the Erg Chebbi, ideally arriving after nightfall such that the morning reveal would have that "wow" factor, I decided to play it safe and stick with Marrakech. After all I myself have never actually been to Marrakech, it has merely been an airport from where I've headed off in all directions other than north. 

Our lives have a reasonable amount of the frenetic about them, an intensity that I find difficult to adequately describe. It is not stress necessarily, but a relentless need to stay at a very high operating level in a world where everyone else is also on that same plane. Once you work it out, and this only really comes with time and experience, you know what you need to do and you do it, but the energy required to keep it up is really quite something. Mrs L is a teacher, something I know nothing about and am universally told I would be terrible at, but I know exhaustion when I see it. A half term break from the pace was sorely needed, we required calm and quiet. The Palmerai seemed the perfect spot, an oasis of secluded walled villas, far enough away from the hustle and bustle of the city, but close enough that we could choose to experience it if we wanted. 

The pool was heated, and steamed gently each morning when the cover was taken off.

I found the perfect place, a hotel with just a handful of rooms set in a large garden filled with citrus trees and palms. Dar Zemora. More people worked here than stayed here, there was an understated luxury about it. This was not a five star all bells and whistles establishment, but it had a thread of old world steadiness woven through it. Breakfast on the terrace, tea in the afternoon, the fire lit in your room in the evening. Even though a world away from Reid's in Funchal, it had that same something about it, the small details that made the difference. We loved it.

Dar Zemora

For the first few days we didn't do anything. We let the wound-up intensity of busy lives in London seep slowly out. I blogged about it in fact, in this post, which I now see I titled "Coming up for air". It did feel a bit like that. With time on my hands I wrote several blog posts, caught up a bit. I dozed, I wandered, had a dip in the pool occasionally. There were Tortoises in the garden, and Common Bulbuls in the bougainvillea that adorned the walls. We had breakfast, lunch and dinner in the hotel, seeing no need to move. I am so good at doing nothing when it's an option.

When we felt sufficiently restored we went on three excursions. The first was to a local botanical garden, Cactus Thiemann. In 1964 a young German guy from Bremen who liked cacti came to Morocco and planted one to see how it did. He discovered that cacti grow really well in Morocco and so he planted more. A lot more. The rest as they say is history. He moved his plants from Bremen to Marrakech and went on collection expeditions to source more seeds and plants that he thought would do well here. Rather like Lotusland in California, one of each cactus was not sufficient, instead Hans Thiemann planted rows and rows of the same species, The effect is dramatic. Interspersed with these fields and forests of cactus are similar of Agave and Aloe. Everything is huge, the cacti are in some cases from his first plantings and half a century old. Some of them become trees, it is extraordinary. My kind of place in other words. 

Our second adventure was to the Medina. An explosion of colour and noise. We'd had the option to stay here but decided for the more sedate Palmerai. But it's only a short car journey away and so we went out one evening. Photographs cannot do it justice, it is an astounding place. Jemaa el-Fna Square is massive, the centre piece of the Medina. Covered in food stalls, musicians, snake charmers, performers, story tellers, from it you plunge into a warren of covered alleyways, shops, stalls, restaurants, parlours, goods of every description and type, here is where you find it. Mopeds zip through the throngs with surprising ease, somehow the flow of people continues and there are no collisions. It is good humoured, loud, lurid, colourful, crazy, scented, a seething mass of humanity either intent on getting somewhere or something, or like us, content to meander with no place or object in mind. It would be easy to get lost but we found our way out again without issue after a nice dinner in a rooftop restaurant as the sun set.

Our final foray was the biggest, an all-day trip out to the Atlas. Oukaimeden, Ouarzazate and the Erg Chebbi may have been out of range, but you do not have to go far from Marrakech before you are what feels like a million miles away. Youssef, the peerless manager at Dar Zemora, organised the entire thing for us, and so after a civilised breakfast a car arrived and we were whisked off to Imlil, a village in the High Atlas in a valley that I had never visited. Here we went for a short hike and then had a meal in a Berber house. On one level it was extremely touristy and as such not something I would usually entertain but somehow this did not matter this time. We were together in the Atlas and Mrs L could now see what she'd only previously had inadequately described to her. What a place, so dramatic, so tenuous, you feel as if some things have not changed for centuries but at the same time there are modern elements too. Villages cling to hillsides as if they might slide down at any moment - indeed this does sometimes happen and there is still evidence of the major earthquake in 2023. As people scratch out an existence here it's a reminder of how comfortable life in London is. Anyway, a lovely break from the rat race which of course is very much in full swing again; the fact we travelled in February and I am only now writing this in May confirming how much we needed this.