Happy Birthday Charles Darwin!

It’s the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin’s birth today, and I’ll be celebrating this weekend by going to Epping Forest to hopefully see signs that the beechwood is beginning to shrug winter off. It’s a good time of year to go outdoors and look for signs of winter’s end – many birds are claiming their nesting territories already and very early wildflowers will be struggling through snow, ice and flood. I could have chosen a million ways to celebrate – there are organised events taking place all over the world over the next couple of days, many of which can be found here. I have to confess though that (shhhhh… whisper it) a lot of the celebrations on that list seem to be just that – formal - you know, a little bit worthy.  I’ll be getting along to a Darwin exhibition or two I’m sure, but to me there can be no better way of celebrating with a walk in a wintry forest and letting my curiosity run riot. Darwin’s greatest strength was his ability to look,  a facility for noticing the small things and reading their implications, a lesson I’ve taken to heart from the moment I could understand it. What could be more appropriate than wandering  in pursuit of my own discoveries, however modest, in honour of the man who’s inquiring mind led to one of the most important discoveries of modern times.