Turf zone – Bannockrigg
Yesterday, along with around 528 other dedicated turfers, I reached a Daily-5 milestone, I’d taken five zones every day for 90 days straight and I’m now the proud owner of the Daily-90 medal. Hasn’t gone at all too badly, just one hiccup when my turf app refused to allow me to logon but was sorted in the nick of time. And a long-weekend break in Dundee required some careful planning and forethought.
I do wonder how many have fallen by the wayside? Looking at the stats on Warded makes for some interesting reading. The Daily-5 does not seem all that popular. At the moment, in round #138, there are 4010 active turfers globally. But when you look in detail at how many have actually started and completed any of the Daily medals to date, numbers are much lower. I would have liked to look at the numbers for Scotland but cannot see any easy way of doing so. I guess I’ll need to teach myself how to use the Turf API to pull out the data but not sure even where to begin.
- Daily – 10, 752 medals achieved.
- Daily – 30, 408 medals achieved.
- Daily – 60, 401 medals achieved.
- Daily – 90, 528 medals achieved.
I find it strange that take-up for the Daily-5 is so low, it looks the ideal thing to encourage people to get out turfing. While the actual effort required daily might me minimal, perhaps the overall long-term effort is putting people off. That, and also perhaps the fear of missing a day and having to start all over again which would be a real pain after your achieved the Daily – 180 and approaching the Daily – 365.
Something else that is keeping me busy turf-wise on a daily basis, as well as a multitude of other turfers, is Kalender Turf 2021. Now at the halfway point, it’s been quite exciting waiting for the email each evening for the next day’s assignment. Nothing too taxing so far but it does pay to carefully read the assignment before proceeding. Something I almost found to my cost on Tuesday 7th.
I’ve been thinking of something along similar lines to the Kalender Turf, the same idea of having a turf assignment each day but for the entire year, all 365 days. Would not be any medals and the entire list would be posted on Planet Gary for anyone to attempt, myself included. However, not sure I could come up with 365 different assignments before 1st January, the start date I had in mind. Mind you, I suppose you could start any day. Food for thought. Please drop me a line if anyone is interested.
Back in October this year, on Turf Blog 15-10-21, I mentioned about finding the decayed corpse of an unknown seabird on the beach at Gin Head, near North Berwick. I reported the leg ring details to the British Trust for Ornithology (BTO) and received an email reply yesterday. The bird was a male Great Black-backed Gull (Larus marinus) and was ringed by Isle Of May Bird Observatory on the Isle of May, Fife, at age at least 4 years on 14-May-2021. So, the poor birdie only survived five months after being ringed. Interesting all the same.
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