An Alternative Natural History of Sussex.
This blog shows the highlights of my day to day findings as a naturalist and ecologist living and working in Sussex. Delivered with a pinch of nihilism, a dash of sarcasm and absolutely no tweeness, here is my attempt to show natural history as it really is: Brutal, beautiful, uncompromising and fascinating...and occasionally ridiculous.
I have been studying natural history for some thirty years, nineteen in a professional capacity. I currently work in Sussex as a freelance entomologist, ecologist and botanist and specialise in nature reserve and rewilding management advice based on the interpretation of the surveys I carry out. I also run a number of identification courses. An advocate of the pan-species listing approach. My main areas of interest are birds, plants and invertebrates and a lot of my spare time is spent in the field. I am the county recorder for spiders and bugs.
I just had a quick break on the Isle of Wight before my field season started and it's amazing how much things have changed for me in just two short years. For a start, I planned the entire trip to coincide with the big low spring tides. I could not pull myself away from the coast. I barely did any terrestrial recording and my hands were barely out of the water. Two years ago though, my back was so bad, I could not have coped with turning that many rocks day-after-day, or netted that much sea weed. That's all in the past now.
I have felt my attention being pulled away from the land to the sea over the course of the last year, writing the book played a part in this but the main culprit is the unrelenting lure of the nudibranchs! On this trip I found two more species for my list, bringing me up to 14 species for the British Isles. We spent a lot of time with Mark Telfer and family in the rock pools, and probably spent more time at Bembridge Ledges than anywhere else. I absolutely loved that site, so many turnable rocks! First up was Palio nothus, a a really small green nudibranch that I only found by sweeping Wireweed and then sorting through the contents in a tray. Close-focus binoculars really help here as these things are tiny.
You really can see how small this is next to a Pheasant Shell above.
The other cracker was Amphorina farrani which I saw at Bembridge and Freshwater Bay, again by sweeping Wireweed and sorting through the material.
At Freshwater Bay, using the same method, I also found St. John's Jellyfish Calvadosia cruxmelitensis! This is only the second time I have seen a stalked jellyfish that I have got to species.
There's always so much going on in rock pools that I just don't have a clue about, I dismissed this thing as a barnacle scar but Mark looked at it under the hand lens and it's clearly alive. I needed some help on this one from the Porcupine Marine Natural History Society, as I would never have realised this was actually a bryozoan! Plagioecia patina.
And I figured this might have been some kind of a coral, but I was really surprised to find out that this is a young Deadman's Fingers Alcyonium digitatum! Look what this becomes (the second photo is from over a decade ago during a SxIFCA fish survey).
And I found this on the first night. A stoloniferan, a type of cnidarian. Amazingly just as I found this the marine biologist Roger Herbert appeared out of nowhere and helped me confirm this as Sarcodityon catenatum.
On the way back to the shore, we found a rock pool that was full of Aeolidiella alderi, there was five under one rock! This is the 3rd nudibranch of the trip.
And in the same rockpool was an adult Aeolidia philomenae. This was huge! Four or five times bigger than all the other ones I have seen. The fourth nudi of the trip.
Here is Bembridge Ledges itself at dawn...
Then for something really exciting; an entirely new habitat for me. Eel-grass or see-grass beds! We went to Seaview and met up with local expert Theo Vickers. I found a couple of new fish for me, Painted Goby and this Straight-nosed Pipefish, putting me at top fish lister on the PSL site! This green pipefish is a real eel-grass specialist. It's about 11 years since I was briefly joint top fish lister last — PSL is all about the long game.
Also there were these Peacock Fanworms Sabella pavonina, another lifer! Really common there.
And a few really large Hairy Hermit Crabs Pagurus cuanensis.
This absolute unit of a Sea Hare!
Loads of these King Scallops.
And the fifth nudibranch of the week, Acanthodoris pilosa. Found floating upside down in the incoming tide.
Look at this incredibly strange habitat! I absolutely loved it there.
And just because I can, here is some Tim Buckley.
Don't panic though, although I am about to buy a wetsuit and get into snorkelling, I have not forsaken dry land and grown gills just yet. Just yesterday, I found a super rare spider at Graffham Common and a beetle new to Sussex but that is a story for another day...
It has been a crazy few years, writing the above book has been pretty full on; no more so than in 2024. As well finishing my manuscript just about on time on the 31st December (following a two-week flow state period where I did well over 150 hours on it and time started to flow more quickly), I also entered quite a few records — 62,429 to be precise. So with less than a fortnight before my field season starts again, I thought I would take the time to write about all the great things going on in the world of pan-species listing.
The book
We are still looking at the moment at a September release. You can read more about it here. Pelagic worked with the brilliant artist Rachel Hudson to come up with the cover with my input, I love it. For those that don't know, the book includes what PSL is, how it all started, where it's going, how to do it and how to get into the 38 taxonomic groups that we use, including what books to get, websites to use, societies to join, what equipment you'll need etc. It's also a very personal book, I've relied heavily on my own experiences to explain the approach, from methods of surveying using the PSL approach to more challenging issues like representation in natural history and a whole load on neurodivergence. I only discovered when researching this book, that I am both autistic and ADHD. Yet I am also only writing this book because of those things too.
The website
The new PSL website grows from strength to strength and is now ticking along nicely. We have 354 people on the main rankings now, we've listed 27,662 species between us. Just 53 of these 354 people have notched up some 4,634,424 records between us, and we've found at least 203 species new to the British Isles. You'll now need a list of at least 2,035 species to get in the top 100! The website is totally free (although donations are welcome) and you can sign up here.
Global Bird Fair
We will be running a stall again at Global Bird Fair this year, along with the twice-daily 1-hour bioblitzes that proved very popular. As well as keeping a species total for the weekend, I'll also be running a workshop/talk on PSL there. This year Global Bird Fair runs from 11 to 13th July.
Mark Avery's garden
The author and conservationist Mark Avery has whole-heartedly adopted the PSL approach to listing all the life he can in his garden throughout 2025. I went up in January to help kick-start Mark's list and found a few spiders new to Northamptonshire in a haul of around 70 or so inverts. Mark is welcoming outside involvement, so if you want to help out you can get in touch with Mark at mark@markavery.info. You can also see follow Mark's progress on the PSL site here where his list is up already.
County PSL What'sApp groups
We've set up a Sussex PSL What'sApp group, there's now a London one (and talk of a Staffs one). I really wanted a way to disseminate info quickly, use it to publicise ad hoc get togethers (often at short notice) and to try and spend less time on my own. As well as hopefully helping out others who are less comfortable out in the field alone. I've already got a Humpback Whale out of it! I am really restricting the Sussex group to people who are actually already doing PSL, i.e, that are on the rankings.
My 2024 recording efforts and pan-species list
Finally, here is a little breakdown of my recording efforts in 2024. So I made 62,429 records across 74 hectads (I am yet to add the Channel Island stuff to this). Like 2023, it's going to be between 4,400 and 4,500 species I think. Which seems to be an upper limit, given the way I approach my 'blind PSL years listing'. I am on 9,331 species now, slipping into 2nd place last September. I should get to 10,000 species in about two years, I am going to try and get there by the end of 2026.
Here's my recording at the larger scale.
And my Sussex records.
The huge mass of records to the east of Brighton are from two large landscape scale surveys that just happened to be contiguous (Basldean and Iford). Along with casual records in Brighton, they merge at this scale into one large mass. I was very pleased to finally get some records for the hectad TQ61 in 2024. Until this year, I did not have a single record for this entirely land-locked hectad. So a casual trip to Herstmonceux Castle rectified that. This square is oddly always really under-recorded, it's not just me.
It doesn't look quite so impressive when you set the map from the 2km grid to default. The big farm in West Sussex was the really impressive Marshalls Farm — a dairy farm where I recorded a huge number of species. Of the 62,429 records, 45,298 were in Sussex alone and have just been sent off to the SxBRC.
I entered 10,736 spider records last year! Yet this is dwarfed by the 15,432 beetle records though.
I still have a couple of reports to finish, and the book is coming back to me for another round of work any day now, but I really fancy a slightly slower year this year, that involves more time outside for fun, as well as a lot fewer 100-hour weeks at the desk (I have processed 400 tubes of inverts since the 1st Jan). A trip to the Isle of Wight beckons though, where sea horses are a very real possibility, I am one fish away from being joint top fish lister too, after my friend found this Topknot at Eastbourne a few weeks ago!
I had a fantastic year in 2024, with all of the surveys I have written up so far returning record numbers of invertebrate species — yet many other people reported the opposite, showing that the truth of what is going on with our invertebrates is far more complex than the "invertebrate apocalypse" that some people claim we are experiencing. At the time of writing, I still have 400 tubes of inverts to go and have already entered 52,993 records of c3,900 species — I will definitely beat my record of c55,000 records last year. Here is a map of my recording in 2024, pleased to see I did more recording in my home hectad than anywhere else.
As I am closing in on 10,000 UK species I am pleased to see that I am still adding something like 400 new species a year. Many of these were incredible wildlife highlights of large, charismatic animals. Not the tiny 1 mm beetles I thought would dominate the lifers at this stage.
So what were the highlights? Here they are in reverse order.
10). A few lifers in my back garden. I love that after 35 years of mothing I can still get new species by pressing a button on a wall and waiting eight hours. At the top of this blog is my first Golden Twin-spot and here, my first Plumed Fan-foot.
9). 1500 species challenge. The reason this didn't score higher is we failed to achieve it and it was HARD. We (Dave Green and I) did however, record and identify 1,158 species (of which 622 were invertebrates) in a 24-hour period of continuous recording and raised just shy of £3,000 for Sussex Wildlife Trust. We also made some really valuable records, like this Pilemostoma fastuosa and Brown Hairstreak larva.
8). The first Midia midas in the UK in 12 years! A brief trip with Esmond Brown to Burnham Beeches resulted in me finding the first Midia midas in the UK in 12 years. I was not expecting a sub-adult male to be identifiable but they really are. The palps are very large and have distinct protrusions in all the right places.
7). Writing this book about pan-species listing. I have only just sent off my manuscript to the publisher, so a long way to go yet but PSL is going from strength-to-strength. We have a new website (you can sign up for free here). Mike, Andy and I have put a lot of time in over the last 18 months to make this site work really well, I love it. We also ran a stall at Global Bird Fair (doing it again this year) and Mark Lawlor designed this new logo! It's a great time to be into pan-species listing. My list currently stands at 9,223 species! I am perhaps two years away from 10,000 UK species. There are more people on the main rankings on the new site in less than a year than there were on the old site after 10 years! Check it out. BTW, the only reason this isn't higher up my top ten is how much I didn't enjoy writing until the last three months.
6). Surveying Burton Pond for Sussex WT. I am still to write this one up but there were some great highlights from this survey. My first record of Light Crimson Underwing (the larva) and the small malachite beetle Cerapheles terminatus was new to Sussex.
5). Two species new to the British Isles; the beetle Colotes maculatus at Chyngton Brooks in East Sussex and the bug Geocoris megacephalus from Jersey.
4). Surveying a dairy farm in West Sussex. I think perhaps a dairy farm was the site I was looking forward to surveying the least but it proved to be the standout survey of the year. I made 5,068 records of 1,237 species (of which 893 were invertebrates). It ended up being the largest list of inverts of any survey I have done. Here is a collage of some of the highlights. And a close up of the spider Hyptiotes paradoxus.
3). Surveying Castle Hill and the Down east of Brighton. Still to be written up yet but I had some fantastic time on the farmland and Downs east of Brighton. Discovering a new population of Wart-biters was a real surprise. Other highlights included the rare weevil Tychius polylineatulus,lots of Early Spider-orchids and my first record of the moth the Wormwood (as a larva).
2). A fishing trip off Brighton. This was just sublime! Undulate Ray, Starry Smooth Hound and Common Squid.
1). Jersey rock pooling. This was just the most magic thing ever. I couldn't get enough of all the nudibranchs. Here are just a few of the highlights Facelina auriculata, Parasitic Anemone and Green Ormer. But it was the immature Spiny Squat Lobster that got away before I could photograph it that stole the show.
And just because I can, here are nine nudibranchs! Five of these were in Jersey rockpools (the other four were from Eastbourne). I have now seen 12 species of nudibranch, I would like to see more of them.
The Lyons Share
Posts
