‘I wonder if I’ll still be writing in another 32 years’ …Stephen Moss on the north Somerset coast. Photograph: Nick Wilcox-Brown/The Guardian Climate catastrophe, biodiversity crisis, divorce, remarriage, 1,000 columns for Weatherwatch and Birdwatch … there’s been a lot to take in. What next? As I filed a recent Guardian Birdwatch column, about the rare Sabine’s gull that turned up unexpectedly on my local patch on the Somerset coast, I realised I have been contributing these short articles for exactly half my lifetime. When counted alongside my Weatherwatch column, this month sees my 1,000th dispatch from the great outdoors. Coincidentally, my first Birdwatch , in January 1993, was also about gulls. It celebrated both their beauty and their ability to adapt to living alongside us, even though most people don’t appreciate them. Since then, Britain’s birdlife has changed beyond what I could have ever imagined. When I was a fledgling birder, during the 1960s and 1970s, the number of species either gained or lost as British breeding birds was in low single figures. I recall the surprise and excitement when Cetti’s warbler and the Mediterranean gull colonised southern England, and the sense of loss we all felt when two once-common birds – red-backed shrike and wryneck – disappeared. During a brief spell of cooling in the north Atlantic, snowy owl – and a handful of other species – arrived from the north. But they stayed for just a few years, before beating a rapid retreat as climate change began to take hold. Fledgling birder … Stephen Moss, aged eight, with a sparrow in a London park. Yet, as I have documented in the past decade or so, my adopted county has seen the arrival of little egrets, cattle egrets and great white egrets from continental Europe, bitterns and marsh […]