24-25 March. Season 2018 opens!

Snow still in the woodlands, lakes and pools still under the grip of ice, but it is a time of change - temperatures climbing to above 5C, skeins of geese heading north,  White Storks and Cranes newly arrived.

And, despite the temperatures remaining low, just enough sun these couple of days to kick the season off - in vivid yellow, a male Brimstone on the 24th, then a Small Tortoiseshell the next day, one Siberian Winter Damselfly too.

So there it was, my first butterflies and damselflies of the year in Lithuania, so the season starts.

A month or so earlier, my younger travelling companion, now at the grand age of nine, announced a list of five places in the world she wanted to visit – Hawaii, Death Valley, the Grand Canyon, the Eiffel Tower and the Dead Sea. With just a weekend to spare, the western side of America seemed a little extravagant and I really didn't have any real desire to visit Paris, so there it was, a trip to Israel on the cards.

With just 2.5 days in the country, the basic idea of this mini trip, beyond obviously a short swim in the Dead Sea for the little one, was just to have an excellent weekend's birding, my only real targets being Black Bush Robin and a male Dead Sea Sparrow, the first of which I last saw in Sudan many years ago, the latter of which two dozen years since last encountering a male.