In December, the television schedules start being padded out
with lots of ‘review of the year’ shows, so I’m going to do a quick review of
my year. In April, I set myself a task to
record as many species as possible in our own small patch of garden. As if that wasn’t hard enough, I didn’t want
to record anything that I couldn’t photograph – not just for the challenge of
doing it, but so that as many as possible could be verified by experts.
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| Red Wasp - Vespula rufa |
As you may be aware, the average garden will contain or be
visited by thousands of different species during the year but I have recorded
only a fraction of that. There are many
reasons for this, one of the main ones is that wildlife doesn’t generally pose
for the camera. I would have recorded
the pair of black redstarts that appeared in the garden a couple of weeks
ago. On 3 occasions they gave me time to
get the camera ready, but not enough time to click the shutter, or even frame
the shot. Black redstarts are easy to
identify, but a number of small warblers passed through the garden on their way
to Africa and even if I was quick enough with the camera, my twitching skills
probably wouldn’t have been up to identifying them. Even things I could identify, like the
orange-tip butterfly that I chased round the garden, never landed, so no
photograph. The identification problem
means that many groups of species haven’t been recorded. I know that there are several species of
earthworm in the garden, and it would be nice to know which species predominate
– I have a book that would help with identification, but it would take a week
to study it, and more time digging up worms and I just didn’t get round to
it. There are more subtle reasons that
some have escaped identification. I have
recorded about 230 species of moth. In
the main they are easy to identify, but there are several groups that
entomologists call gen. det. jobs.
These, in common with many other insects require genital examination to
be certain of their species, and that means killing the insect which I wouldn’t
do just to satisfy my curiosity.
Another reason for not identifying or photographing species
is that they are far too small. The
majority of insect species are less than 3mm long. I would need a good
microscope even to see one clearly, and there aren’t many field guides that
include anything as small as that. And I
haven’t any chance at all of identifying any of the thousands of species of microbes
and fungi that help us with the compost and the fertility of the vegetable
patch.
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| 14-spot Ladybird - Propylea quattuordecimpunctata |
So having told you a lot of reasons for not recording
species, what did I manage to record?
The list includes 231 moths, of which 57 are micro-moths, 12 butterflies,
13 beetles, of which 5 were ladybirds, 7 bumblebees, 3 social wasps, 2 solitary
wasps,3 dragonflies, 2 woodlice, 4 spiders, 2 mammals – a rabbit and a brown
rat, (the vole and mouse are still unidentified), 60 plants (non-cultivars) of
which 4 were grasses, 3 grasshoppers or crickets, 10 hoverflies, 10 shield bugs
or capsid bugs, 15 birds, and one species each of slugs, earwigs, harvestmen,
robber flies, scorpion flies, sawflies and mayflies. If my arithmetic is correct (unlikely!) that
makes a total of 384 species.
All the numbers above refer to species and not individuals,
of course. The records have all been
lodged with Sussex Wildlife Trust (SWT) using iRecord. They are available to view, using iRecord
(you will need to register with iRecord) by searching for the location ‘Glebe
Cottages’. And Sussex Wildlife Trust
would be very happy for you to record your own sightings, I can recommend doing
it. iRecord can be found at
www.brc.ac.uk/irecord.
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| Canary Grass - Phalaris canariensis |
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| Eyed Hawkmoth - Smerinthus ocellata |
