January 2015

Snail Trail 2015

Several years ago I read Patrick Barkham’s ‘The Butterfly Isles’ and was struck by a particular thought. What he achieved was seeing fifty-nine species of the most colourful, visible and well-documented insects in the UK. A feat, I may add, that has been achieved by at least two people I met on a single day on a nature reserve this past July, i.e. a lot of people have done it.

Aren’t I critical? I haven’t even done it myself. Perhaps that’s where all my vitriol stems from – I’ve never had the time or money to try it.

How about ‘Dragonflight’ then, where Marianne Taylor...

New year, new numbers

kitenet's picture

Submitted by kitenet on

It's been ages since I updated my species group totals, partly for the very dull reason that I've swapped from using MapMate to using iRecord to store my records, and of course the species dictionaries between the two systems don't match up, so it's taken me ages to work out what my total actually is. But I've now got the figures sorted on my profile page, and can see what progress, or lack of it, I've made since I last totted everything up on 19 February 2013 (the totals from...

Confessions of a failing pan-lister

As one of the 'original' members of Mr. Telfer's pan-listing league table (it wasn't called that back then), it has been warming to see such an avid uptake of the concept, with over 100 naturalists willing to share their numbers with others. The most warming aspect of this has been the realisation that quite a few of them are relative youngsters - the study of inverts, lichens and more obscure groups than these seems to be in safe (young) hands. But with this influx of 'newbies' comes a personal reckoning - that of sliding down the league table. I left the top 10 fairly early on and found...