We ran a stall promoting the PSL movement, the new website and my book (out next year) at Global Birdfair. It was my first time there in over 30 years. So what did we actually do there? Well, I left it to the last minute to arrange it all but somehow, with less than a month's notice, we managed to make it a real success.
First off, Mike Prince and I got up there on the Thursday to set up our stand. Here's Mike after we set it all up.
Yes, he did make PSL mugs and t-shirts! They'll be all the rage come next Birdfair, you wait and see! I put together a fiendish ID quiz and Mike set up a laptop and a screen to show our fancy new website in action. We kept a pan-species list for the whole area, for the full three days.
If you didn't know, this is how you enter a species onto the website. Just hold the species up next to the screen, and it magically appears on you list! Well, not quite. First you have to identify it!
We wanted to make this species list a collaborative affair but we also needed to boost the numbers ourselves. The way we did this was to run six, hour-long bioblitzes. We ran two a day, one at 10:00 am and the other at 2:00 pm. I was shattered after day one. So I was very welcome when the cavalry turned up on Saturday, in the form of...Andy Musgrove!
It was great having an extra pair of hands (as Mike was also co-running another stall). I don't think I could have spent three days at the stall without some field time, so having Andy to help out with the bioblitzes and chatting to people on the stall was a life saver. We recorded 175 species across all taxa on the first bioblitz and 203 species by the time we did the fifth. The sixth bioblitz was more chilled and indulgent, we used this to target a veteran Ash tree and an oak tree and got some nice saproxylic species.
I absolutely loved doing these, especially when we had a mixture of mad-keen young naturalists/PSLers, enthusiastic amateurs and complete newbies. I was throwing species at people at an incredible rate and yet despite this, everyone found them really enjoyable and worthwhile. Seeing new PSLers grab my net and come back with pockets full of insects was just great, or seeing someone see their first Marbled White is what it's all about to me. I finally got to meet Ben Mapp, Brian Laney and Clare Boyes, but also met Max Cantrell, Zak Spaull and Ben Rumsby. I am continuously impressed by this new wave of young naturalists coming through, they are all so knowledgeable for their age, imagine what they will be like in 20 years! I wish I had had PSL in my teens instead of starting doing it when I was 32.
So how did we do? Last night I finally identified my last specimen from the weekend, bringing our three-day total to 641 species, including a whopping 437 invertebrates. This was boosted by adding a couple of moth traps to the data set, kindly collated by Ben Rumsby (we'll definitely bring traps next year). Here is a breakdown of what we recorded.
I even managed a few lifers, such as this micro moth that mines the keys of Field Maple, Etainia louisella. Thanks to William Bishop for this one.
I must have made nearly a 1,000 records in my notebook over the weekend but it's going to take me a while to get these written up, so sorry if I promised anyone these sooner. I have to prioritise work and it took me eight hours yesterday to enter 1,149 records from two days at Ken Hill. Watch this space. It's amazing to list 54 spiders but not a single one is classed as Nationally Scarce. This would be totally different down in Sussex, where so many more species at the northern limit of their range in the UK. I digress.
A massive thanks to everyone that helped but no more so than to Mike and Andy. Without them creating the new website, I would not have even entertained going there this year and having all three of us together for the first time since the new website's inception was also great. Even with the three of us on Sat and Sun though, we probably needed a couple of other people to help out. It was exhausting, albeit in a really good way.
So, will we be there in 2025? Hell, yeah! We'll have a bigger profile next year, and hopefully I'll have finished the book by then too. And I bet we can get to 1,000 species for the weekend! But we will be looking for a few more recruits to help out. Maybe some of the young PSL whipper snappers can come and help?
Finally, here is the full species list. Of the 437 invertebrates, nine can be considered to have some form of conservation status. These are highlighted in bold below. If we do this annually, imagine what the accumulative list will look like after a decade or so. You can see the full live list here. And you can start pan-species listing yourself, at www.panspecieslisting.com.
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