Country diary: A 30-year journey from fertilised farmland to wildlife heaven | Mark Cocker

Cosford Hall, Suffolk: The biodiversity here is astonishing - and our goal was to find the owners 10 new speciesI'm still searching for an alternative title for the "bioblitz" (those terrible war connections!), but as an exercise in nature connectedness, complete absorption, learning, humility and fun with a dash of competitiveness, it has few equals.Normally a bioblitz involves identifying as many life forms as possible in one place over one day. Since the owners of this 30-acre former farm have an inventory of 1,100 fellow residents already, our goal was more modest: 10 new species for their list. Some additions were admittedly less than exciting. Traps set the night before yielded several of a moth family called "the pugs": 50 tiny elongated flakes of greyness with lines of minute dark-grey dots. They have names like grey pug, plain pug, shaded and mottled pug, but ours was perhaps the masterpiece in anonymity - common pug. Continue reading...