Puddletown Forest Walks

Puddletown forest doesn't have any way marked routes so, during 10 months of walking the puppy, we have come up with a short (brown) and long (blue) walk. The long walk is sometimes extended to include the pond near Thomas Hardy's cottage. The map below I drew for the purposes of recording so I know which 1km square we are in at any one point. I send dragonfly and moth records to Living record and butterflies to the Dorset butterfly conservation website.

Birding, recording and tweeting

Work has been slow coming in this year so I have invested some time in learning how to submit records of moths and dragonflies and how to use twitter to find out what others are seeing locally. White winged black tern is a rare migrant in the UK and one I missed years ago when living in Dundee because I refused to be distracted from my work. This week I finally got to see one in Wareham.

More Meetings in 2014

The other two meetings of 2014 provided me with an update on another previous research field. The British Association of Dermatologists meeting was held in Glasgow and included a new session dedicated to genetic disorders. Key researchers in the field gave updates on the novel therapies that are being tried for these often devastating disorders. Back in the 1990s, when I was doing research into one of the keratin disorders, it seemed a long way in the future before therapy would be possible but now there are promising clinical trials underway. Another breakthrough is in the identification of underlying genes causing some of the remaining disorders that had been tricky back in the 1990s. Thanks to next generation sequencing, a new technology that has revolutionised the way we can look at the genome, it is now possible to find the gene, a vital first step towards understanding what is going wrong with the skin in a genetically inherited disorder.

I was also invited to an Ichthyosis Support Group meeting in Newcastle which was an opportunity to meet patients and their families and understand better what it is like to live with these disorders.

These two meetings were timely, helping me update my lectures on human genetic disorders of the skin that I was due to give in October 2014, for the first time in 6 years.