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2 September 2006 HERE'S A LINK TO A SITE that does much better than this one at providing nice pics of the wildlife in Kent. It's called 15 Acres in Kent -- Wildlife in the High Weald. The area covered is near Horsmonden, which is about 9 miles (15 km) northwest of where we are. The site owner, John Webley, says that his "aim is to show the remarkable diversity of wildlife present on a relatively small piece of land and to track, over time, the benefits of the various measures taken to enhance the site (hedges, ponds, trees etc.)." Hmm, snap .. sort of! Anyway, lots of good pics of an extensive range of wildlife, all identified but only with accompanying text in the Amphibians section (notes on the predation of Great Crested Newts). The Butterflies, Dragon/damselflies and Other Insects sections are particularly good. A very useful site to help identify one's finds and see what's out there in the first place! The only owl at the moment is a Little Owl. The pics come up in two columns on long pages, so you do rather need broadband. They can't be enlarged, but are large enough as displayed to see detail well. Nice to see a pic of a Willow Warbler (and a Garden Warbler), which we have round us as well. In our patch the Willow Warblers seem to have been silenced this summer by the July heat, but hopefully they'll be back next year. No Turtle Dove though. Two or three come to our area in the summer, but sadly we didn't hear them this year. These are birds we're really hoping will be back next year. It'll be a real loss if they don't return. (Summer 2007: They haven't, sadly. Turtles are having a bad time; see my page on them.)
9 September NEED COMPREHENSIVE WEBSITE STATISTICS? Having looked around for some time, I'm impressed by what StatCounter has to offer. I have a counter, by Web-stat, which also provides quite good stats in the free service. But with this I can't find out where vistors have been and how long they have spent. So I was checking around for a free service that might do this. It might sound like spying to some, but it's very helpful to know which pages visitors seem to like and how long they spend there -- i.e. do they read all the guff or just flip instantly to the next page ... or away from your site altogether! StatCounter offers a free version, limited to 500 records (i.e. page visits), of its full service. This is very useful as without laying out a bean you can see exactly what you'd get if you moved up to one of the paid levels, which simply means that more records are kept by StatCounter (e.g. 1,000, 10,000, 25,000 etc.). Statistics are reasonably well presented and, to judge from the User Forum, people like what they're getting a lot. Here's the StatCounter link. The experience of seeing where visitors go and how long they spend has been a little shocking! Many visits are very short indeed and may only involve a couple of pages that are linked somewhere else on the internet. These visitors don't explore other parts of the site. On the other hand there seems to be a lot of interest in the equipment I'm using, which accounts for a large proportion of visits to the site. Probably even more than the owls, but this may be because I don't rank as high as I'd like in the search engine pages. The picture here is actually a bit variable: for example, if you put the rather general "tawny owl" into one of the serach engines I use (Yahoo, MSN, Google) I'm nowhere -- maybe after page 15 of the results, which is awful! But searches on the more specific "tawny owl pics" or "tawny owl recordings" brings the site up much earlier and quite often on page 1 of the search results.
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