The uses of Bio-listing #432

I’m irresistible to insects. More specifically, the flesh-piercing, blood-sucking kind. They love me and want to be near me, or at least find me a convenient source of a good meal. I’m afraid the feeling is not mutual – insects are fascinating, wonderful, often beautiful creatures, but not when they’re eating me. So here’s a use for Bio Listing I hadn’t thought of before this week: figuring out whether or not I can sleep easily in my bed. A sinister, dangerous-looking mosquito-type thing had settled on the bedroom wall, ominously close to my pillows, but a quick glance through Chinery (the insect field guide of choice) suggested it was a non-biting midge. I looked at the little creature in a new light, and considered that his dark fluffy antenna and jaunty posture were not so threatening after all.

Elsewhere I’m starting to pick up on more things that aren’t birds. My mammal list is now formatted and up to a whole six species. Six! Heady stuff. I remembered to identify the catkin I bought home from a walk the other day (hazel, which I should have figured out from the tree it came from), and I’m slowly remembering some of the other, easier trees and starting to assemble a tree list. Oh, and I saw a fish. I’ve put it down as a brown trout, of which I’m fairly certain – sleek, streamlined nose, lightly spotted, zipping under a bridge near the mouth of Hampshire’s River Test.  Which is so good for fly fishing that even US presidents have tried their hand here: it’s a beautiful river, although consequentially this means large stretches of its banks are private and sadly out of bounds to the bio-listing likes of me. 

This morning I’ve been taking part in an altogether larger listing enterprise, the RSPB’s Big Garden Birdwatch.* If you’ve not yet taken an hour to see what visits your garden, I recommend it, and you still have until dark today. I almost always see something new for my garden (goldcrest one year, siskin the next), as it’s rare for me to gaze out the window for quite that long a spell, although I’m not sure I’ve yet watched the same garden more than once. What a nomadic lifestyle I’ve been leading. If you’re reading this too late, well, never fear, the RSPB recently initiated a summer version in July, with more than just birds on the menu. Or why not take up watching the garden regularly? Bedroom walls, rivers, gardens, a patch of weeds growing up through a crack in the pavement – there’s nowhere you can’t Bio List. 

*Full rundown to come at Considering Birds (link). You lucky, lucky people!

Chris - When is a tick not a tick?

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When it’s half a tick. Or a quarter. Or lots rolled into one. You see, the trouble with ecology is that it’s bound and limited, like physics, by the philosophy of science. Bear with me on this. What I mean is that reality does not consciously operate in accordance with natural laws. My Nissan Micra, as it gently disintegrates with age in the absence of an external energy source (such as an expensive mechanic), is not contemplating the second law of thermodynamics. Similarly, I somewhat doubt that the Common or Ring-necked pheasant, Phasianus colchicus, is thinking to itself ‘aha! I’m a pheasant! Not a partridge, but a pheasant!’ as it plods about its daily business of pecking, gazing about vacantly, being startled, and trying to get run over. I doubt they are thinking anything much of substance at all, in fact, but that’s just me picking on pheasants and is somewhat irrelevant to my argument. Which is, in a true and biological nutshell, that the idea of a ‘species’ is a completely made-up one. Useful, but does it actually exist? Or are the boundaries always somewhat more blurry than we’d like?

The other similarity with physics is that the more arcane corners of ecology are often comprehensible only by the experts. There’s a lovely example in the latest RSPB magazine, in which Connor Jameson writes delightfully about dance flies performing over his front lawn. But by his own admission he can’t hope to identify the actual species involved from one of the 350-plus occurring in Britain. (Truly, the mind boggles.) Perhaps the international dance fly expert could.*

That doesn’t mean the rest of us can’t have some sort of meaningful, enjoyable encounter with whatever perplexing creature is before us. But it makes setting the ‘rules’ of Biolisting somewhat tricky. I expect to identify many non-birds to family level only this year, if even that accurate. Then what? To get a grand list total, as birders like me are wont to want, do I simply add the number of invertebrate and plant families, where identification to species level was impossible, to a total number of bird species? What about subspecies, if, like last year, I see both pied and white wagtails? Or dark- and pale-bellied Brent geese? Different colour morphs of the harlequin ladybird?** Speaking of which, what about native / non-native rules for non-bird taxa? Is there a bug equivalent of the official British Birdlist, for example? A bit of a pickle. Lots to learn. Just as well this isn’t a very serious business…

*He or she must be great at parties – it would certainly make a great job title on a name badge. “Hi, my name’s Cornelius and I’m the world dance fly expert. Shall we?”

**We have most of them hibernating in our house, well, at least the orange one with lots of black dots, black ones with two red dots, and black ones with four red dots. To use the technical terms. I have been known to eject them back into the ‘wild’ via the bedroom window, though it occurred to me this might technically be in contravention of the Wildlife and Countryside Act. Oops.

Sally - Not in my Back Yard!

My back 'yard', April 2011

According to my lovely neighbour, there’s some mighty fine compost in one of our communal compost bins.  However, the news comes with a word of caution to watch out for the neatly-dug tunnel within the mighty fine compost, which we presume is the work of a resident rat, or family of rats, a notion reinforced by the subsequent finding of what appears to be a perfectly-preserved rat jaw in the immediate environs of the compost bins.  Fortunately, both said neighbour and I have rather a fondness for rats, so knowing that they’ve made themselves at home in our back garden, for us, is something of a bonus!

Yesterday there was a definite waft of Spring in the air – it wasn’t particularly cold, green shoots and even flowers were bursting forth, and goodness knows what the little gang of male Blackbirds thought they were doing…  So, to the garden it was.  Now, to most people’s minds, our back garden doesn’t really justify the conventional description of a garden, in that it’s tiny, full of plants of the wild, rather than cultivated, variety and um, tiny.  There is no real soil to talk of, only that in created planting areas, and nothing anywhere that is more than about 10 inches in depth.  We do have a pond but, yep, you’ve guessed it, it’s tiny.

But, I love our little garden, and poking around in the undergrowth with camera in hand is a much-appreciated simple pleasure.  And yesterday’s activities did not disappoint.  First port of call was the wilderness area around the compost bins, where, amongst the mass of Brambles, Ivy and Honeysuckle, revealed the above-mentioned rat remains, Teasel babies galore (note again, when imagining these in their full splendour, the small size of our garden…), Herb Robert flowering away, Wild Strawberry plants doing their stuff, a whole multitude of sweet-smelling Primroses, many, many wiggly worms, and a lone 7-spot Ladybird.   And, keeping us company throughout was a fine selection of our finest House Sparrow friends, some noisy Jackdaws, the male Blackbirds ardently pursuing each other in and out of the bushes, and a lone, cheeky Robin, the latter no doubt keeping his beady eyes open for fresh worms on which to feast.

7-spot Ladybird Coccinella septempunctata on Bramble

Having cut back the Brambles and Honeysuckle, trimmed the Stinging Nettles, transplanted an accidentally dug-up Primrose, stalled a mini-landfall in the log pile, and removed the now-dead parent Teasel, it was time to move upstairs.  In order to maximise the space available in our (tiny – just in case you’ve forgotten that important issue) garden, we have recently expanded onto the flat roof of our kitchen/bathroom.  However, due to a combination of slug/snail attack and losing out to other activities, I’m rather ashamed to admit that during 2011, the roof-top tubs and containers ended up being the victims of neglect.  The peas and beans had disappeared only days after popping their heads up above the soil, a handful of straggly brassicas were determinedly hanging in there, and my hopes for leeks larger than spring onions had long gone out of the window. 

So, harvest time it was, and the Small Person soon set to work trying to extract the leeks from the soil, which, despite their small size, had deceptively tough roots.  A few ‘oomphs’ later and the first of many cries of exultation was heard, ‘Look Mummy!’  It wasn’t long before the Small Person’s cries proved too enticing to ignore, and I soon clambered up the ladder to join in the vegetable gathering.  As well as a good pile of mini-leeks and some token cabbages-cum-sprouts-cum-purple-sprouting-broccoli, we managed to uncover a whole load of half-forgotten curly-whirly parsnips, whose normal growth had been limited by the shallowness of their growing container but whose discovery led to a great deal of amusement. 

Despite all these exciting vegetable discoveries, for me, one of the highlights has to be the finding of a new species to add to my life-list, a positive eruption of Cabbage Stem Weevil larvae, no less – little white wiggly things, no more than a cm long, with shiny orangey heads, which quite frankly, need no further description, as it seems, they tend to do what it says on the packet, and munch away at brassica stems.  Whilst digging for parsnips, we also came across a rather sluggish, somewhat plain and unattractive (so harsh!) caterpillar, which I have yet to identify, or even attempt to identify but I hope to bring news of this later.

Cabbage Stem Weevil (larva) Ceuthorhynchus quadridens

I guess the moral of my post for today, is wherever you live, be it a bustling city, sprawling suburbia or in a little rural village by the sea, whilst looking for those big things in life, it’s always worth making time to look under your nose, chances are you won’t be disappointed.

In the meantime, today is another day, and the never-ending saga of my failed attempts at diver-spotting continues, with a venture into Penzance and Marazion to find Black-throated and Great Northern Divers, plus the odd Long-tailed Duck and a Slavonian Grebe.  If my past efforts are anything to go by, then don’t hold your breath!

Chris: In the Beginning was The List

“The man gave names to all cattle, and to the birds of the air, and to every animal of the field.”*

Did being able to name the deer we saw resting in Macclesfield Forest on New Year’s Day add to the thrill of seeing them? Undoubtedly. And I think most of our small walking party was quite interested to know that these were Red deer, living wild in a small group of young males, a powerful living organism resolved and clarified from an otherwise generic mush of ‘deer’.

Was the sight of a female lesser-spotted woodpecker foraging at the foot of a tree trunk sharpened by knowing it was the first I’d seen clearly after more than two years of searching in vain, and the irony of it being one day too late to count as a 2011 tick? Absolutely. Two red grouse squatting on the moor’s edge made better by them being the first I’d ever seen? Undisputedly. (We got incredibly wet in the half hour that followed. Note to readers: horizontal hail and exposed 400-500m open moorland is even less fun than it sounds and put a literal dampener on the rest of the day’s listing.)

We list to make things known. Because it’s good to know what they are: it enhances pleasure at a sighting, and aids in conservation of the very things you’re enjoying. It’s very hard to protect biodiversity if you don’t have a clue what it’s made up of locally, and therefore, how it might work. We list because it helps you to become a better natural historian and ecologist, which we trust will eventually lead to excellent careers all round.

We list because it helps you to sit up and pay attention – especially in this early part of the year, no bird or beast will be allowed to go ignored and slip by if it could be named and ticked. (Though I’m of the opinion that poking at plants and peering at insects can mostly wait until the weather warms a little.) But most of all, we list because we’re geeks. Hopeless, infatuated, spreadsheet-creating geeks. We just can’t help ourselves – we see things, list them, and declare them to be good.

Keep watching this space and, with any luck, see our lists grow.  

*Genesis 2:20a, NRSV

Sally - New beginnings

Well, due to rain stopping play, my plans for a Grand New Year’s Day Recording Spree went completely out of the window, and all I managed for the day were the resident House Sparrows (merrily munching their way through fatballs and seed) and Herring Gulls (yelling from the rooftops in their own inimitable way) – oh, and a lone earwig that surprised us by crawling out of a cardboard box.  Not much of a start, I know, but today is another day, and no sooner is breakfast out of the way, then we’re off, soup in flask, binoculars in hand, cameras at the ready, and pens and pencils poised for action.

A quick peek out of the window this morning has revealed a modicum of blue sky, although the weather forecast suggests otherwise.  Still, the torrential rain seems to have abated, so there can be no more excuses.  Being January, plants and invertebrates will be thin on the ground compared to the warmer months, so the today’s emphasis will be on our feathered friends.  Local bird reports suggest divers, gulls and ducks galore, plus a number of smaller species, which given my track record, will evade me completely.  Still, a girl can try!

Arggh, spoke too soon – the rain is coming down in bucketloads!  Hopefully it won’t last…

OK, less of this procrastination – let the recording begin!