Wildlife. Brilliant, isn’t it? Making lists – also brilliant. So what’s not to like about the concept of listing everything one sees in a year, whether it flies, crawls, bounds, squirms, or inches? Or maybe even sashays? Not much, I’d still say, with one large caveat – one quickly gets out of one’s depth.
Now, with birds, I’m OK. I’m a bird fan, I’ve liked birds for a long time, I generally know what something is the moment I get a good look. Even if it’s something I’ve never seen before: if I half expected to ever see one, I’ll hopefully have done my research and know what ID features to look for. Butterflies, too, are just about OK, with a slightly heavier reliance on the field guide. There aren’t so many to get to grips with, they’re brightly coloured, and if they stay still, you can generally get a photograph to refer to later.
However, move on to something less familiar, and I’m soon floundering. Take weevils for example. (Or leave them, if you prefer.) Until a few years ago, I’m not even sure I knew how to recognise a weevil. Now, I do. Although, saying that, all I can tell you about how to do so without cheating is that they are the beetles with the preposterous proboscises. Apart from these two brownish weevils below which don’t have particularly funny noses – yet I still look at them and think ‘huh, weevils’. Why they are weevils is a technical definition I should probably look up*, but one thing I can say for Bio-Listing is that it’s at least doing wonders for my ‘what order/family?’ skills. 
Still, I had a go at these two, and after a bit of internet digging and flicking through the ever excellent Chinery (Insects of Britain and Western Europe – highly recommended as an entomological jumping off point**) I concluded that the one on the left is probably in the Polydrusus genus, and that the one perched on my van’s windscreen on the right is, despite looking very similar, actually a pea weevil.***
So weevil identification is possible. But, apart from myself, who have I just helped? The presence of one pea weevil along one hedgerow in Kent is of little biological relevance by itself. My records need to be plugged into the national network to be of any use, and ideally, to have been collected in a more rigorous, systematic fashion. That’s the direction our group is nudging each other in, and many of us are already submitting vast amounts of high quality data, often concerning organisms I know even less about than I do weevils – marine organisms, for example. It’s a whole other world.
But there are so many things to look at, and so much is new to me, I still find all the animal and plant groups distract from each other too much to have a concerted go at any one, birds aside. This was to have been the year of moths – but during the warm dry spell (now a distant memory) I got distracted by bees, wasps and wildflowers, then flies, a brief flirtation with the year’s first few butterflies, a side-step briefly into moths, my original intention, then lately back to plants in general. And bees again. And now weevils. Or spiders. Or the beautiful, bright orange fungus I saw this morning. One day, I’ll either settle down to just a few groups – knowing everything is probably a bit too much to ask. A master of biodiversity – now, wouldn’t that be something?
*”A weevil is any beetle from the Curculionoidea superfamily.” – Thanks, Wikipedia! But why is a weevil a weevil?!
** Available here, though you may want to wait until September for the new edition – the old one is likely to prove pricey until then. Neither Michael Chinery nor his publisher pays me any commission, by the way!
**Without keys for each order, I usually struggle to do so well, and end up feeling more like one of the three incompetent entomologists. See no weevil, catch no weevil, ID no weevil…
