New Year in Bloom: Sightings 2026

Hoverfly Sightings W/C 1st January 2026

Happy New Year everyone!

Hope all my readers have had a great festive season and are ready for new adventures to begin in 2026.

It’s not been the best of weeks for me with regards getting out and about nature spotting, but I did get out New Years Day and the 2nd of January, so below are the listings for those days. As I sit here and write up my sightings, I am looking out on a dusting of snow which always makes a lovely, picturesque setting, until someone goes out and puts boot prints all over the place.

Click below to find out what I found.

Christmas in Bloom: Sightings 2025

Hoverfly Sightings W/C 22nd December 2025

It has been a while since I did a sightings blog, but it being Christmas I thought I would go out spotting in and around my locality in order to finish off the records for the year.

Often people will go out on New Years Day to log flowers and birds they have seen. I thought I would do this throughout Christmas week. Over the last few years a few botanical groups have started doing these types of logs, as seen on social media, but I haven’t seen many birding groups doing the same has yet. I am sure it will become popularised over the next few years.

Click below to find out what I found.

The HoverflySpotter logo

What Hoverfly species are to be found in the logo below?

The site has been up a few months now and let me start by thanking all those people that have visited, followed, subscribed and even re-visited, it really does help the channel grow and inspire me to produce more content. If you have not followed or subscribed, please consider it.

🎄 Something a bit lighter today, a little Christmas challenge. 🎅

For those of you who have noticed the logo to the site or the little favicon icon specific to the internet page on your desktop, you might have been wondering what hoverfly species this is…. Well, its no particular species at all it is a mishmash of many species all amalgamated into one.

 I wonder if you can guess which species……. Answers below… 📝

Card Game Nature Fluxx

Nature Fluxx the Card Game

Designed by Andrew Looney and Alison Frone.

Illustration by Derek Ring and Alison Frone.

Publisher Looney Labs.

Player 1-6 Ages 8+ Time to play 10-40 minutes.

www.looneylabs.com

Nature Fluxx is an ecology-themed variant to the popular card game Fluxx, published by Looney Labs and released in 2015. This is a much smaller game than Wingspan and comes in a very compact 10 by 13cm box with 100 cards and 1 sheet of instructions. If you are looking for that stocking filler for Christmas this might be the game. It also comes with a disclosure that 5% of proceeds are donated to environmental groups! 

It’s a very easy game to pick up - shuffle the deck and deal 3 cards to each player. Put the basic rules card on the table and then pick a player to go first. Their first task is to draw 1 and play 1 and that’s where the fun starts. It’s a game that quickly turns into this chaos where the rules are forever changing. The objective of the game is to meet the current goal using your keeper cards, but nobody can win unless there is a goal played. The goals also constantly change, and the next rule change or action might determine whether you win or lose. But beware there are creepers in the deck which can prevent any player from winning not just you!

Bird Board Game Wingspan

Wingspan the board game

Designed by Elizabeth Hargrave

Illustrated by Natalia Rojas, Ana Maria, Martinez Jasamillo and Beth Sobel

Publisher Stonemaier Games

Players: 1-5 Ages 10+ Time to play 40-70minutes

With Christmas fast approaching I thought it would be good this month to do some reviews which may help with that Christmas shopping. The original Wingspan I bought pre-Christmas many years ago, but the expansions have been kindly bought for me in the following Christmases and how delighted have I been to get them. Unboxing a game is exciting—just search "unboxing board games" on YouTube to see its popularity.