Having just spent two hours keying out two small dung beetles, I just came across this angry
blog post about Mark Telfer's article on pan-species listing and the blog author's
response to the comments he received and felt like I needed to make a few things clear too. Just in case any readers are not entirely with me on why I am currently listing everything and trying to get to 4000 species by the end of the year, the reasons are as follows:
- I've been studying natural history for some 20 years now and as my knowledge base grows, it gets harder to remember what I have seen without some framework that is required to keep learning. Listing helps this. It also points to the areas where I know less and allows me to target my natural history. It gets me to new sites and enriches the whole experience. I want to be the most effective naturalist and conservationist that I can be, I can't do this if I am ignorant.
- Life is short and I want to experience as much of the natural wonders this country has to offer before I die. I try and photograph most new things I see too, another resource that is valuable to conservation as I give all my photos to Sussex Wildlife Trust.
- The more you know, the greater the range of work you can do in the field of conservation and help put something back in. If everyone only sticks to the easy to identify groups, we will end up in a situation where there might one day be no coleopterists or lichenologists for example. If we don't know something is there, how can we possibly help to conserve it if the need arises?
- Listing for me evolved with this blog, the two feed each other (I was doing neither this time last year) and the listing ensures the blog is full of new things and that my enthusiasm is maintained. I get the impression people are not put off by the listing theme, in fact people seem to like it.
- It's fun. I am actually enjoying natural history more than I ever have which I didn't think was possible. Having an arbitrary goal that is dauntingly far away means I am having to get out there a lot. I am seeing things I have always wanted to see that I just have never got around to seeing (and might not ever have seen if I hadn't started this challenge) as well as things I didn't even know existed!
Anyway, here's some more statistics: Natural history is more than a job and a hobby to me, it's a calling. I have studied wildlife for as long as I can remember, worked in conservation for the last decade, have given up months of my spare time, ran dozens of lectures and courses, helped conserve countless species, observed and identified 3107 of those species, (the two dung beetles were ticks) walked thousands of miles of transects, helped dozens of people with their ID skills and started a blog that within 9 months has had over 25,000 page views and I love every minute of it. I'm 32, I have 15 piercings, 6 tattoos and dreadlocks. I'm no anorak. Sadly there are people out there that get fixated on the word listing and don't look beyond that to the reasons for doing it. Wildlife in this country will be a tiny bit better off for my listing efforts both directly (in the form of records) and indirectly (by expanding my knowledge and sharing it with others).What's the problem?
I would have been within my rights to have posted an angry comment under Dylan's article but I don't see what that would gain. I blog for fun in my spare time, I don't want to be drawn in to an aggressive debate when I should be enjoying myself. I have not had a single negative comment on this blog and I would like to keep it that way. Consider this my response then, I want to show how this is nothing more than a wholly positive endeavour and I hope this has come across in this post. I know of two people I have helped inspire to put their lists together already from this blog, one who is only 17 and has already seen 1017 species! I bet he will be working in conservation in a few years. How could anyone put a negative spin on that? Thanks for following!
Oh, the photo by the way is the Fly Orchid fooling the wasp Argogorytes mystaceus which I took at Wolstonbury Hill in 2008.
I new it was gonna be a good day when I heard (and then saw) a Blackcap singing in the neighbours garden when I was getting ready first thing. Round four of the winter farmland bird surveys already and spring was very much in the air today with dozens of Skylarks singing as well as at least five Corn Buntings (above) singing too. What was interesting was the absence of certain birds, I didn't see a single Song Thrush, Linnet or Meadow Pipit today and the Common Gulls seem to have moved on also. All the big flocks seem to have disbanded and everything is much more spread out. Best part of the day though was getting at least two ticks. I found this Hairy Snail Trichia hispida under a very old Giant Puffball, I've seen the shell before but never a live specimen.
As I was walking back I caught a couple of different Aphodius dung beetles to identify later and a had a quick look at a patch of gorse to see if I could see Gorse Shieldbug Piezodorus lituratus as I have never seen this common species. First branch I looked at had one sitting right out in the open! Note the red antennae and the bluish stripes along the sides of the body. I had a really awesome day, glad I got a survey in and ended the day on 3095 species. The weather tomorrow looks awful so I think I'll take the day off which means I'm going out tonight!
Mothing in the early spring can be very disappointing. In my garden when I was a kid I usually did not even catch a single moth until April. When we put the trap out at Woods Mill on Wednesday night this week we caught 20 moths and I was quite pleased with that. It reminded me of something quite surprising that happened in 2009 at Woods Mill. I put the trap out for the first time that year, a bit later than usual as I had been to Australia for the whole of February, it was the night of the 12th March 2009. It was unseasonably mild but I did not expect this!
It is to this day by far the largest number of individual moths I have ever caught in a single Robinson trap. 905 moths, 737 of which were a single species: Small Quaker. Here is the full list:
Small Quaker 737
Common Quaker 78
Hebrew Character 19
Twin-spot Quaker 10
Dotted Border 9
Clouded Drab 9
Shoulder-stripe 5
Oak Beauty 5 (top photo)
Small Brindled Beauty 5
Chestnut 4
Lead-coloured Drab 2
March Moth 1
Satellite 1
Tortricodes alternella 19
Parsnip Moth 1
Dytiscus marginalis 1
Mid summer usually holds the greatest totals where I have trapped before over the last twenty years, even when I have trapped in woodland before in spring so it was a real surprise. It was so much bigger than the next biggest catch I've recorded which was under 500 moths. I would love to know more about huge anomalous catches, please comment if you have experienced anything like this and particularly if you caught more in a single Robinson trap. I have heard stories about people estimating Silver-Ys by counting how many fit in a pint glass and then counting the number of pint glasses!
I forgot my lunch today and so a trip to Henfield to get a sandwich from Truffles replaced my usual walk around Woods Mill. As I stepped out of the sandwich bar I spotted this Herald on the other side of the road next to a man waiting for the bus. This has got to be one of my favourite moths, I love the bright white dots and stripey legs. My first encounter of these was in caves in the Peak District, lots of them, along with loads of Tissues that I have only ever seen once in Sussex (at light at Mill Hill).
The moth trap is out at Woods Mill tonight for the first time this year, I can't wait! I can only liken moth-trapping to how Christmas morning felt when I was a kid! Of course, I will only be looking at micros and by-catch if I want to see something new at this time of year. Oh, the photo is with the Canon by the way.
Whilst brushing my teeth this morning, I had the feeling I was being watched. I looked up to see this little jumping spider (it was only about 3 mm long) on my window. I keyed it out to genus and got an identification, which thanks to Andy Phillips, I can now say was correct! It's a female Pseudeuophrys lanigera. I thought I saw this in Woodvale a few months ago but I was not sure. It's great to get a tick from within your own flat! It's particulary fond of roof tops apparently, just like your friendly neighbourhood Spiderman. The second photo is the epigyne, the sexual organs of spiders are external and hence dissection is not required as it is with so many other difficult invertebrate groups. It's not easy though matching the epigyne to the illustrations in the book.
There were quite a few inverts on the wing today and I have to admit to a very embarrassing tick at Wild Park today, the Marmalade Hoverfly Episyrphus balteatus. This is one of the commonest hovers, I've just never got around to keying it out and recording it. I also added another naturalised plant species growing up there, Oregon-grape. That puts me on 3090! Now, I have just found a tiny black flea beetle sitting by the light switch that makes this spider look huge...
Juniper is struggling in the south east of England. Many populations are aging without any new seedlings developing. There are a number of reasons why this is not happening and these include: changes in management, increased grazing pressure from rabbits and loss of seed fertility caused by several host invertebrate species.
About three years ago at Levin Down, the Reserves Officer Mark Monk-Terry fenced off an area from rabbits to allow regeneration to occur in the compartment which contains about two thirds of all the Juniper on the site. It has also been ungrazed by livestock over this time. Bramble and woody plants are beginning to appear and so grazing is now required to stop this becoming a problem. A search for any seedlings was conducted on Thursday (I'm gutted that I was off sick and missed the moment) and Reuben Beckett (Assistant Reserves Officer) found these two seedlings almost immediately. They were only a few centimetres tall and only about 30 cm apart and were close to a Juniper bush at the western edge of the colony. Thanks to Reuben Beckett for the photographs. A further hour and a half's searching did not yield anymore seedlings but this does not matter, we now know that Juniper regeneration can still occur on this site. This is a great result and I am going to get out there this week and have a look at the micro-habitat and see what we can learn from this. We will also carry out a seed fertility test from the adjacent bush to see if that was a significant factor.
I have just bought a copy of
'British and Irish moths: an illustrated guide to selected difficult species' by Martin C. Townsend, Jon Clifton and Brian Goodey. I have to say I am impressed. I fear many people will be put off by the microscope shots of dissected moth genitals, you shouldn't be. If you are a moth-er, you should get this book, even if you only ever use the paragraphs on external characters it will be worth it. The best thing though is the detailed, step-by-step description of how to dissect a moth's genitals. I know many people are put off by this but once you do it, it opens up a whole world of natural history. It does however require a microscope, something I use now way more than my telescope. Many beetles for example are impossible to identify without dissecting and taking the odd specimen. I think this kind of text might even encourage people to move on to these more difficult groups (I would say though that dissecting a moth is pretty hard compared to a hard bodied insect like a bug or a beetle). You can buy it from
BC at the introductory price of £15 (plus £2 P&P). So please don't be put off by the technical side of this publication, it's a brilliant piece of work and it's so much more than a load of old bo
As some of you may know my back has been playing me up this week and I have been unable to work for the last three days. Bored silly and stuck in the flat I resorted to sorting out my Flickr account and came across a photo I took in Summer (May/June) 2005 at Cliffe Pools of a pyralid moth. I didn't ever come up with an identification that I was happy with and I have just come back to it and I think it's the rare immigrant/occasional resident
Sciota adelphella. I went for a second opinion but was told it was not possible to separate it from
Pempelia formosa from my photo.
Having nothing better to do and realising it's the only way I am gonna add anything to my list when I'm house-bound, I searched around online for some photos of each. Have a look at the links above. In all the photos of S. adelphella, the central white wavy line is slightly closer to the head than it is to the wing tips. The distance between the two white wavy lines is far greater than the distance from the outermost wavy line and the wing tip. In P. formosa, the central wavy line is slightly closer to the wing tips than it is to the head. Also, the distance between the two wavy lines is about the same as the distance between the outermost wavy line and the wing tip. It also has a black slash mark between the two wavy lines and seems to roll itself up in a tube more. These observations are only based on a number of photos I have found online, I have no experience of either moth.
If I had the specimen, I think I would be more confident but as it was nearly six years ago I have to rely on the photograph. What would be great is if someone out there reading this knows the answer. I also have no real idea about who exactly is reading my blog so I thought it would also be a good test to see who's reading! Any moth-ers in the Dungeness area should be familiar with these species so please let me know what you think.
I find it quite galling that an invasive naturalised species is a tick just as much as a nationally rare native is a tick as far as your pan-species list is concerned. How could it be another way? As I have not been that good at keeping a list of the established alien plant species I have seen, I scoured the texts and added nine vascular plants to my list putting me on 3081. From False Acacia growing on the heathland restoration at Farnham Heath RSPB to Silver Ragwort abounding on the vegetated shingle at Shoreham Harbour.
This one however was a little more interesting. I found this growing along the banks of the River Rother (West) near Fyning Moor in May 2010. It's Perennial Honesty and gave me a run for my money as it wasn't in any of the books I usually use and didn't look that out of place. At first I was convinced I had found a huge native crucifer that I had for some reason never once noticed in the books but in the end I found it in an old photographic guide and it was indeed an alien species. I'm certainly not celebrating these plants being part of our flora but as far as your pan-species list is concerned, New Zealand Pygmyweed and Lady's-slipper Orchid both count the same: one! So I better make like Fox Mulder and be a little more vigilant with my alien spotting. Fades out to music from The X-Files...
This is
Quedius lucidulus and it's a species of rove beetle new to Britain that was discovered by Mark Telfer during a deadwood invertebrate survey of the Sussex Wildlife Trust reserve
The Mens that was funded by the
West Weald Landscape Partnership. Read
Mark's blog with all the details and thanks to Mark for the photo. Rove beetles are a difficult group, there are more species of rove beetle in the UK than there are species of macro moth! This is a remarkable find and the fallen dead tree where the
three specimens were trapped supported many more rare and scarce invertebrates including a single specimen of
Oxylaemus cylindricus, thought to be extinct in the UK since the 19th Century until it was found by Mark at Ebernoe Common (another SWT reserve) in 2009. We had great expectations from the fallen Beech from the moment we set eyes on it but I don't think anyone expected it to be quite so productive.
The
Saproxylic Quality Index for the site is 476.3, making The Mens the 39th best site for deadwood beetles in the country and the 4th best in Sussex. An Index of Ecological Continuity of 54 shows the site is of national importance for these fascinating invertebrates. In total, 10 RDB species and 38 nationally scarce species were recorded at The Mens during the survey!
The site is currently a 'non-intervention' site but it's clear that this method of management is not ideal for invertebrates at this site and some work is suggested in the report with an emphasis on creating more open space and nectar sources within the woodland. In addition to this, we need to be better at liaising with our neighbours about how important the resource of deadwood is to these invertebrates. What other exciting finds await discovery in the West Weald?...
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