Pan-species Listing is thriving! We've never had more people taking part as we do now, it's a great time to get involved with this worthwhile and intensely enjoyable way to do natural history. We're heading to Global Birdfair for our third year now. This year we have lots going on, so please come and find us. This is what we are up to:
1). We have a stall again, Robin 76. I will be selling (signed if you want it) copies of my book at a discounted rate.
2). Come and ask us (myself, Andy Musgrove, Mike Prince and Mark Colvin) about all things PSL. We will again be pan-species listing the event (and adjacent nature reserve) with the website setup live so you can see our progress. Last year we reached 824 species over the three days, rising to over a 1000 species when we combined the 2024 and 2025 species lists! I would love to beat last year's total, but with other commitments this year and the weather, I am not going to go crazy this time. Well, OK just a little bit. Here's the list from 2025, and the list for 2026.
3). We'll have some moths and other inverts to show you on our stall but we really need YOUR records too from the event. Please do come and find us with any and all records to add to our list - anything and everything. Big lists of moths and other species very welcome.
4). We have one-hour bioblitzes daily, where we typically record c200 species. They're fun and fast! Drink up all the species identified by myself and other experienced naturalists. Come find us on our stall at 10.00 am and 2.00 pm each day (11.00 am on the Sunday though).
5). That's because I am doing a 45 minute talk at the Turnstone stage on Sunday morning at 10.00 am about the book. Head to our stall straight after for books and/or the morning bioblitz.
6). This year I am trying to see 6,000 species through the course of 2026, as of Wed I am on 3,962 species. I am well on target but if anyone can help me get a species or two, I'd be super grateful.
7). I am also only 44 species away from 10,000 in my lifetime! If anyone can get me a lifer I'll be over the moon!
Really looking forward to it, hope to see you there.
On the 11th, 12th & 13th July, Pan-species Listing had a presence at our second Global Birdfair and we were again listing the whole event on the site and the nearby meadows, hedgerows and woodland. We were keen to beat our 2024 total of 641 species but I have only just this afternoon finished identifying all the specimens. Did we make it? You'll have to wait... The set up was the same as last year, Mike set up a laptop and screen on our stand so we could tick species off as we found them and Andy arrived on the Saturday. I ran six one hour bioblitzes each day at 10.00 am and 2.00 pm (it was much hotter than last year and they were tough) and as we'd done it last year, far more people knew to bring their records to us. Especially those camping and running moth traps.
Here's our stall, with this year's new recruit, Mark Colvin who helped out for all three days.What a legend! A huge thanks, Mark.
We had Gatekeeper and Humming-bird Hawk-moth in the stall before we had even set it up.
I ran a talk to kick things off and the first two bioblitzes were extremely hot, setting the scene for a sweltering weekend! It's great to see familiar faces at these events.
As per usual, I forgot to take photos of people or landscape shots for that matter - just close up shots of small invertebrates and moths in pots. The first trap we opened on the Saturday morning was really lively and I got a couple of lifers. Eudemis porphyrana is a Na species on apple (which is abundant there). I have been wanting to see this for years! As I close in on 10,000 species, I still find new species most days, averaging at more than one species each and every single day, even in places that don't at first glance seem that exciting. If you hit any site hard and for long enough, you'll find something exciting!
The moth list for the weekend was nearly double that for 2024, as was the butterfly list. Purple Hairstreaks were doing very well. Then the Saturday bioblitzes started and we met this star, Billy! Billy and his mum Clare came out on two of our bioblitzes and we were all gobsmacked at how good a naturalist Billy already is at age 10. Not only that, he is super keen and really good at finding stuff and spotting things that are different (all the photos of us out in the field here were taken by Clare). You know it's going to be a great hour when species #1 is Osprey!
Billy found some great stuff too. Including this Stoat skull!
We turned a log and Billy knew this was a Lesser Stag Beetle straight away! I don't think I knew this species until I was about 30. He is planning to join us and help us out even more next year, and we look forward to seeing him then and how much his pan-species list has grown by then! Keep up the great work!
The best way to do well in natural history is to start when you are young, so he's on a tried and tested route to end up doing something really exciting in the field as he gets older.
I wandered around a bit more this year and found a few more interesting areas. There are some big old trees here and many of the more interesting beetles are deadwood associates. Such as Platystomos albinus (Nb). So, did we beat last year's total of 641 species? Too right, we smashed it with 824 species! Here is the breakdown compared to last year's stats, along with an accumulative total for both 2024 and 2025 combined.
Look at that accumulative total! In just six days over two years in July we have recorded 1,036 species at Global Birdfair 749 of which are invertebrates. Of the 824 species we recorded this year, 395 were not recorded in 2024. This is not surprising though, it's amazing how many invertebrates you only ever find one of when surveying. Pan-species Listing can help you become a really great all-round naturalist but when we are considered collectively we can be formidable. A massive thanks to everyone who contributed records, especially Ben Rumsby and his dad (and for turning my trap on when I was off site) and also to Neil Phillips.
Next year I will be doing book signings, as it is due to be published on the 27th January 2026. You can pre-order it
here. You can sign up to pan-species listing
here for free!
And finally, here's all 824 species from those three days! I have highlighted the 17 invertebrate species with conservation status here in bold with their abbreviated status.
UDATE: I should add that we were not policing or verifying other people's records that were brought to us here, all species were accepted on face value and the records to be submitted directly by each observer. Away from moths and birds, most of the records were ours however. Also, thanks to Skev it seems that Monochroa palsutrella is a county first (we trapped this on an amazing tropical night on the 11th to 12th along with quite a few wanderers and lots of by-catch).
Last year, with very little prep, we used the fantastic new pan-species listing website to collate all the sightings of all species recorded over the weekend at Global Birdfair into one big list, a pan-species list. We recorded collectively some 641 species, with an impressive 437 of these being invertebrates. You can read more about the 2024 event here.
This year, with a little more planning, we hope to get to over 1,000 species.
Here's how you can contribute:
- You can attend one of the six one-hour biolblitzes/workshops that we'll be doing over the weekend (two each day at 10.00 am and 2.00 pm mustering at our marquee at R78 ROBIN). These were generating hundreds of records, in fact most bioblitzes generated around 200 species across all taxa per hour! Bring a net if you have one.
Here's a one-hour bioblitz in full swing in 2024, much of the action occurs around my oversize tray. Warning; they are intense and very fast but a huge amount of fun.
- If you are running recording events yourselves or are just doing some casual recording in the area, then come along to our stand and let us know what you have seen.
- If anyone is running a moth trap, please let us have your species lists too.
- Remember, EVERYTHING counts in PSL, not just moths, plants and birds, but every beetle, spider, lichen, fungi and sea slug. Well, I doubt very much we will have any sea slugs but I can but dream!
Please note, PSL is not a recording platform, so do still submit your records the usual way (we recommend iRecord).
Here is a map of the recording area.
I look forward to seeing lots of pan-species listers, biological recorders and birders over the weekend!
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.
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!
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.
Feeding time at the zoo (not sure who took this but thanks).
Thanks to Robin Sandham for this composite image of one of the bioblitzes.
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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