The Lyons Share

This photo has made me realise I need to keep my iPhone 6 in my pocket and start getting the Coolpix 4500 out of my bag more often! This is the Top Snail Trochoidea elegans, a naturalised snail that, in Sussex, is only found on the Downs near Denton. Most likely it arrived via Newhaven. There are hundreds up there and as a non-threatening accidental introduction, they are quite a pleasant addition to our local molluscan fauna. They are unusual among terrestrial snails in their wide conical form, quite similar to the top shells you get on the coast. Smaller than I though but very variable and quite odd looking from underneath. Thanks to Steve Teale for the gen and Mark Telfer (who couldn't make it today) for the inspiration. 

I walked a little further down the hill and realised I was right next to one of the farms I surveyed for Natural England back in 2010/11, very close to the fence line in this post. I went into Stump Bottom where I found many more Top Snails, though much smaller ones this time. This patch of the NVC community CG7 (dominated by Wild Thyme, Mouse-ear Hawkweed and the moss Homalothecium lutescens) but all I found was Sitona humeralis and Galeruca tanaceti. Any day now I'm gonna hit 1000 beetles but it's not today! 

Usually at this time of year, I burn out of natural history. Mentally exhausted from identifying nearly EVERYTHING I see for a whole summer. So much so that even when I'm 'off duty', my brain continuously identifies things; birds flying over head calling, roadside plants that fall into my field of view, every single moth (or small piece of symmetry) on a shop window. Search image is such a powerful tool that it becomes a subconscious process if you use it frequently enough. I walk around at this time of year feeling a little like Terminator searching for Sarah Connor. Most people back stage at a festival would not even notice the fly. I actually can't stop it you know, I've tried. I'm permanently wired to record.

Yesterday I entered my 30,000th record on to my Recorder database (it was Rhagonycha fulva) so I thought this would be a good time to celebrate and promote biological recording. This includes 7632 plant records, 5372 birds, 4212 beetles, 3981 butterflies and moths, 2483 spiders and 1116 bugs among many more. Here is the view of my records nationally, at the county level and in the People's Republic of Brighton & Hove.

1) Know your basics

I don't want to teach people how to suck eggs here but good biological recording contains at least the following information: Species, Recorder, Location, Grid Reference, Date and preferably some level of abundance or qualifying data.

2) Register on iRecord!

I don't use iRecord as I have my own personnel database BUT if I was starting again and I wasn't a professional, I would be using it. It's a great way for getting your records in AND verified without sending your data to dozens of different recording schemes, you can sign up here http://www.brc.ac.uk/irecord/.

3) Get a smart phone or a hand held GPS

Smart phones have some great features for helping you record. Cheap GPS apps. Increasingly good cameras. Access to Internet resources. If you have a hand held GPS, this is also very useful. I enter my more interesting records in as 'way points'. I type in the species name in short hand on the key pad and it stores the grid ref to 10 figures (I only use 8) along with the time and date.

4) 8 figure grid ref vs site centroid

A site centroid is a generic grid reference for a whole site. It's really good for walk over surveys, recording common and abundant species, birds flying over or when you are recording a LOT of species. A detailed 8 figure grid reference is much better for casual recording, stumbling across something unusual or out of place/time etc. I try to put as much in to 8 figures as I possibly can. Have a look at my records for Woods Mill for example. If I was just putting in to a site centroid, there would just be one blue dot in the middle and that wouldn't be good for informing site management. You can always scale back if you start detailed but you can't do it the other way around!

5) What to record?

You can't record everything. In Brighton I'd be recording Herring Gull every day. That's not gonna tell anyone anything. If I'm doing a survey and that's my job, I obviously record everything but casual recording is a little different. I try to record something everyday and I always record anything that's unusual. So I would always record the following:

Once upon a time I used to record every Firecrest I heard but these days I hear as many as I do Goldcrest. So this does change with time. You can't record everything all of the time!

6) Push yourself!

Concentrate on the the most difficult groups you can identify as you are more likely to make a valuable contribution to the recording world this way. It's not that hard to find county firsts with invertebrates, even in this heavily recorded part of the world! I'm not saying don't record the commoner things but you'll get more out of biological recording by pushing yourself into new areas in addition to the obvious. The best way to do this is to get into Pan-species Listing. Have a look here http://www.brc.ac.uk/psl/.

7) Keep up to date

Don't let your records build up into a back log! This can be hard to achieve but if you try and chip away at your records every day/week the job becomes more manageable. I've been there and it's a nightmare. If you do have a back log, concentrate on your contemporary records! This also helps to recognise the value of recording. A worrying number of people who work in conservation do not submit any records for example. I believe this is because in recent years we have forgotten the importance of recording and it's slipped down the priority ladder becoming a nice thing to do! It's absolutely vital to our understanding the world around us. Challenge yourself. Make one record a day for a year for example!

8) Some other useful websites

If, like me, you're not using iRecord, I find Grab a Grid Reference invaluable at finding grid refs when I don't have my GPS. You can get an 8 figure grid reference easily using the aerial photos there.

I also use this website for figuring out what vice county (useful for cataloguing site locations systematically in Recorder) I'm in if I'm out of Sussex http://herbariaunited.org/gridrefVC/

9) Be prepared

Always have some form of a camera, notebook/phone and some kind of pot for bringing a specimen back for identification. Sometimes you get stuck without anything and you need to improvise. This was what happened to me when I got stuck without anything last year coming back from Cross Fit.

10) Have no shame!

Wildlife doesn't wait around for people who are worried about their image or whether someone will be offended if you butt in! You often only have a few seconds to react and it's best to just go for it. People will forgive you for butting in, stopping the car or making a slight detour but you'll never forgive yourself afterwards if you aren't prepared to drop everything ALL of the time. Here are a coupe of examples...

So, no matter where I am, I'm recording wildlife. Such as this longhorn beetle. Recorded in Suffolk back stage at Latitude festival. I was helping Bryony load in Marika Hackman when I had to stop, drop the gear and 'borrow' a box of filters to put the specimen in to be identified at a later date. It was a male Stictoleptura rubra, a species I hadn't seen before. Longhorns are one of my favourite groups of beetles so I wasn't missing the chance at a new species. 

Last month I blogged about a survey we are conducting at Malling Down and Southerham and this week we carried out our fourth visit and it was rather good. The highlight was hearing Chris Bentley bellow "DOROS!!!". Not knowing if he had caught it yet, I legged it down into the Green Pits at Malling to find Chris looking very pleased with himself and something large and wasp like flying around inside his net. I've always wanted to see the Phantom Hoverfly Doros profuges as it's one of the few species that has acquired an English name, albeit via the BAP process. It's a cool name none the less. It is genuinely rare and difficult to find and is quite a convincing wasp mimic, even moving like a wasp. Thanks also to Chris for the photo.

However, that was not the rarest find of the survey. I swept a bee that got James and Mike excited and this turned out to be the RDB1 Halictus eurygnathus! This species really is restricted to the chalk around Lewes and Eastbourne and is so poorly known that we were informing the autecology of the species just by sweeping it off plants it's currently not known to nectar on. Also in the Coombe at Malling Down James recorded the Na bee Andrena fulvago. Cistus Foresters and Rose Chafers were also recorded and we were all in agreement that the site couldn't look better with a wide range of structural diversity and nectar being available. Here you can see masses of Common Rock-rose, Dropwort and Bird's-foot Trefoil. Go an have a look this week, it's amazing!!!

Also of note was this larva. It was by far the most abundant larva we were sweeping and was present in all six areas surveyed. The only noctuid moth I could ever remember seeing up there in any numbers was Dusky Sallow. A quick Google search and we soon realised this was indeed the larva of Dusky Sallow. Another tiny piece of the infinitely large jigsaw puzzle added!

This week I finally caught up with one of the rare mammals that is so significant on some of our West Weald woodland sites, the Bechstein's Bat. This rare woodland bat is heavily protected and was captured as part of a survey by fully licensed bat specialists. It's a fairly big bat with large ears, noticeably bigger than Natterer's Bat which we also saw.

But who was Bechstein? A quick Google and I found this page. It seems Johann Matthäus Bechstein was one of the first naturalists concerned with conservation and the bat was named in his honour. It was described by Heinrich Kuhl, who it seems was a younger contemporary of Bechstein's who died at the age of 24 in 1821, only a year before the much older Bechstein passed away. What I find remarkable is that the naturalists at this time (nearly 200 years ago) were able to catch and describe this and other species like it, with very little of the equipment we have today. It must have been such an exciting time with so many species being undescribed then. I guess the only way we'll ever witness a period like that again is if we find another planet with life on and start describing that too...

13/06/2015 UPDATE: So I accidentlay wrote that Bechstein's Bat is my 49th beetle (this is clearly not true as I have seen many more than 49 beetles). This was brought to my attention by Dr Robert Hoare of New Zealand who left me this comment which I just had to include here...

I've recently determined that
the Bechstein's Bat is not a bat...
What observations sway me? Many:
the 'ears' are saucer-like antennae...
that fuzzy 'fur' (I'm sorry sweetie)
is clearly Coleoptera setae
(the kind that keeps a chafer safe
when other chafers start to chafe)...
those wings, apparently of hide?
Elytra (highly modified)!
It has six legs, but due to frost,
two pairs have recently been lost...
and what are these? Surprise, surprise:
they're single-facet compound eyes!
My stark deduction bears repeatal:
the Bechstein's Bat's a bloody beetle!

This summer another battle is unfolding above the streets of Lewes. On one side, Malling Down with its steep sided Combe and scrubby Green Pits and on the other Southerham Farm, with its secluded valleys and ludicrously named Bible Bottom. Yet which one is 'better' for invertebrates? There is only one way find out! FIGHT! Well, no. Actually it's to carry out a repeatable and standardised survey that can inform the management of these two superficially similar yet surprisingly different sites. That's exactly what we are doing this year and we have recently completed the third visit...

Once a month from March until September we are recording all the species we can find within six discrete areas (three on Malling and three on Southerham). We always record for the same time across all six areas. The sites are very rich, particularly in scarce weevils, and the total number of species recorded so far stands at 293! Above is the smart but diminutive (3mm) weevil Tychius schneideri. It only feeds on Kidney Vetch which is abundant at Southerham on Bible Bottom but mostly missing from Malling (conversely Malling has all the Common Rock-rose). So how do the two sites compare? So far Malling is winning with 201 species and Southerham is on 179 species. This difference is likely to be down to the lack of scrub at Southerham but that's not to say we want Southerham covered in scrub (but some scrub is good). A better way to compare the site's qualities for invertebrates would be to compare the proportion of species with  conservation statuses but that will have to wait until the survey is completed. Remarkably, only 87 (30%) of the species were recorded on both Malling and Southerham (so not that similar after all or just an example of how hard invertebrates are to find? Or how many species recorded occur at very low densities?). Out of the six sites, the Green Pits at Malling is currently coming out best of all with 102 species. It has the most scrub of all the plots, the least amount of south facing slope BUT a hugely varied topography. It's an old quarry on the north of the site.

Perhaps the most extraordinary difference is the abundance of the RDB Carthusian Snail at Southerham which has so far not been recorded at all from Malling. In many parts of Southerham it's the most abundant snail and was recorded in all three plots there during the first visit. The sites are only separated by a few hundred metres of golf course!

Also as Southerham lacks Common Rock-rose, it also lacks the Cistus Forester that's present at Malling Down. Both sites are covered in Knapweed though but it's only Bible Bottom at Southerham that has the Scarce Forester that feeds on the Knapweed!? So which site will come out on top? I believe Malling will end up with more species but Southerham is likely to have a higher proportion of scarce species and species associated with chalk-grassland. We'll have to wait and see though!

It's been a while. I've been very busy with the field season this year so very little time for blogging or even taking photos but I couldn't resist a few shots of this beast. This impressive looking insect was recorded by Trust volunteer Ellie Blows on a phone camera todat at Woods Mill. I was too busy with interviews to go and have a closer look there and then so I handed a net and a pot to Ellie and I was pleased to find she had managed to bring it back for a closer look. It's not a Hornet but the Hornet mimic Large Alder Sawfly Cimbex connatus. There is only one other Sussex record, being from last year, so it's clearly starting to spread. This is a large insect and would not be easy to miss but it would be easy to mistake for a Hornet. Check out those jaws!!!

It's not a new species for me though, as I am convinced that this is the larva of the same thing that I found last year at Woodwalton Fen in Cambridgeshire. However, I'd much rather see the adult than the larva! It's certainly a new record for Woods Mill too. Great stuff.

Until today I had only ever seen two earthstars, Collared and Sessile. Now I've seen four. Yet I'm not sure which four. So how did all this start? Well, with a sneeze of course. Tuesday morning I sneezed and put my back out so I've had a rough week with it. No training. Two walks to the GP's the only exercise in four days and then come Friday it got worse. Walking to the GP's, I got an email from Jim and Dawn Langiwicz asking about the Cedar Cups in Midhurst. He couldn't find them but had found what he thought was Arched Earthstar Geastrum fornicatum in a churchyard nearby. He was starting to think he had two species though and I agreed from his photos. So Tony, Heather and I went across this afternoon to have a look and it didn't take long to find the species on the right which we knew wasn't Arched Earthstar. We were pretty convinced it was Beaked Earthstar Geastrum pectinatum. We looked for the second (the left-hand one) which we were (and still are) convinced is Arched Earthstar Geastrum fornicatum. Here's a close up of that one.

Apart from the obvious colour differences, they seemed more upright, with a stouter collar, more 'blocky' spore capsule (Tony pointed out the two species had different spores too), they lacked a distinct beak and also lacked the raised rim around the beak of the other species.

Here is the other species showing a rounder spore capsule. Badgers have been so busy in the cemetery that they had dug a few of the Arched Earthstars up, so I took one over (the above photo) for direct comparison.

So I'm having an exciting night in identifying things when Tony chirps up saying he thinks we've got Rayed Earthstar Geastrum quadrifidum. I think he's right. The beak looks too short for beaked, which also lacks the raised pale area around the beak. The neck seams a little stouter too. We'll have to wait and see what the mycologists say. Either way, I've always wanted to see one of these cracking little things and was pretty stoked to see two within 20 metres of each other.

In the morning we had a walk around Ambersham. Nice to things like Brismtones and Green Tiger Beetles out but the highlight for me was seeing my first Sussex Uloborus walckenaerius. Ambersham is one of only two sites in West Sussex for this RDB3 spider and I beat three from heather along the side of a south-facing path.

I also saw the first new beetle I've seen in a while, I beat two Sphaeriestes castaneus off a pine tree. Lovely to get back out in the field and to feel like I'm on the mend again! A big thanks to Jim and Dawn too for the earthstars, the first real cool day out in the field in 2015!

As the weather was fine on Sunday, I wanted to go and beat some evergreen shrubs to see what I could get out of them, as you do (seriously great for entomology in the winter). I've been eyeing up the Juniper on New Timber Hill but haven't got permission to record there yet so I headed over to Levin Down (with Niall).

A pair of showy Red Kites greeted us at the reserve, Niall was impressed. We started beating Juniper into a white tray and it was a bit disappointing to be honest. Too windy for the detritus in the tray and because of this, it was hard to detect motion. We recorded about 40 species in total so not the end of the world but no lifers. Highlight was probably Corizus hyoscyami (above). I've seen this bug quite a few times now (this is the 16th time I've recorded it in five years) but it's so active in the summer, I can't get them to sit still for a second, this is the first photo of one I've ever managed.

Here is a couple of shield bugs beaten from the same branch as each other, left is the Gorse Shieldbug and right Juniper Shieldbug.

And what I believe must be Juniper Aphid Cinara juniperi. Go and beat an evergreen bush near you and see what comes out!

A couple of weeks ago at the annual Sussex Biological Recorder's Seminar I was approached by Brad Scott (above) during lunch who said "thanks ever so much for that course on Grasses, Sedges and Rushes that you ran several years ago, it really kick-started my interest in natural history." Now if I tell you that since this course, Brad has been on my Common Woodland Bryophytes course and has almost seen more mosses and liverworts than me now (have a look at the PSL rankings for bryophytes) it starts to put things in perspective. Yet this is just the start of Brad's natural history adventures!

It's exactly this kind of inspiration that I always hope my courses will provide. It's certainly not going to be everyone that gets the bug like this but even if we reach one or two people a year in this way we are making a difference. So, I asked Brad if he would mind writing a few words about his experience with the Trust's courses and this is what he put together...

So why not book on one of the many fantastic courses Sussex Wildlife Trust has to offer? I can't promise that you'll become a Ghostbuster but you will certainly learn something about the amazing wildlife of Sussex and have a great time in the process. Call 01273 497561 for more info (I resisted saying it!).

Ten months ago during an invertebrate survey at Flatropers Wood, we (Alice Parfitt, Chris Bentley and I) collected a specimen of a female Andrena (mining bees) that remained unidentified, until now. Bear in mind that last year was the year I first attempted keying out solitary bees, so it was with some trepidation that I keyed this particular bee out to Andrena ferox, an RDB1 BAP species with one record in Sussex 70 years ago!!! Basically the rarest Andrena in the country. I keyed it out again after sleeping on it and it came out to the same species (thanks to Dave Gibbs for his help). Then I keyed it out with James Power at work and we got it to the same species. Finally today, county recorder and bee wizard Mike Edwards took a look at it and confirmed it as this species. This is by far my best find of 2014. It's the jewel in the crown of the invertebrate fauna of Flatropers Wood, a site that I should add is not even an SNCI. If you want to read more about Andrena ferox, have a look at the BWARS page and Steven Falk's excellent flickr stream. It looks like many other bees but it has bright orange hind femora, which are themselves covered in orange hairs. Other bees do share this feature though, so again it comes down to microscopic features.

We have so far recorded 610 species of invertebrate from Flatropers during the survey, 297 of which were recorded from the Pylon Ride where Andrena ferox was recorded on the 24th April 2014. We've recorded 32 species of aculeate (bees, ants and wasps) and 27 of these are from this ride. The ride really is where much of the interest of the site is but it was particularly good in the spring and the autumn, showing how important early and late visits are to these kind of surveys. It's produced some really great finds, have a look through some of the highlights here.

So what next for this bee? Well we will go and have another look if we can find more individuals and perhaps find the nesting aggregations in April but I hear this bee is incredibly hard to find (apparently, or am I just really lucky?!) and we may never record another one. We can however take a good look at the site and knowing the bee's requirements, see if there is any management we can put in place, if any, to improve its chances there. It's a very welcome return to our invertebrate fauna and just goes to show how you can make significant finds with relatively limited experience if you adopt the right approach!