Extreme entomology at The Hollies

Having travelled to Shrewsbury last weekend to speak at the excellent Darwin Festival, organised by Shropshire Wildlife Trust and partners, I took the opportunity to do some extreme entomology. Okay, so The Hollies (next door to The Stiperstones, near Shrewsbury) is a bit higher than where I live, 350 metres as opposed to 100 m, but the altitude can't be said to be extreme. And although a cold, gloves-on February day might not be the usual choice for bug-hunting - the temperature records claim it was 7-8 °C, but with a biting wind it felt a good deal colder - that wasn't really extreme either, although it did make it hard to keep the beating tray steady. No, the extreme thing here was the trees I was searching for signs of insect life: a range of ancient Holly trees, some believed to be about 400 years old.

The Holly trees at The Hollies are an extraordinary range of shapes. Many are individual isolated trees that have been sculpted by wind and time into gnarled shapes that stretch and lean. There is precious little shelter to be had, either for the trees themselves, or any insects that might live in or on them, or indeed for the visiting entomologist. This must be one of the few Holly populations anywhere in Britain where the Holly Leaf-miner fly (Phytomyza ilicis) struggles to gain a foothold - I found just a few mines on one of the slightly less exposed trees.

Pogonocherus hispidus on Holly bark at The Hollies

But a lot of insects clearly do make their home here, as testified by the peppering of beetle exit holes in the trunks and limbs of the trees. And in fact the first insect to fall out of a Holly and onto my beating tray was the Lesser Thorn-tipped Longhorn Beetle (Pogonocherus hispidus). Larvae of this small (5mm) but attractive beetle develop in the small branches of a range of trees including Holly. Do have a look at these two great close-ups by John Hallmén on Flickr.

An hour or so of beating and grubbing around the trunks of the the trees produced a small list of other species:

• Holly Speckle fungus, Trochila ilicina (a tiny fungus that only grows on dead Holly leaves)
• Lesser Thorn-tipped Longhorn Beetle, Pogonocherus hispidus
• a fly, Sylvicola cinctus
• Holly Leaf-miner fly, Phytomyza ilicis
• a flower bug, Anthocoris nemoralis
• a flower bug, Anthocoris nemorum
• Common Rough Woodlouse, Porcellio scaber
• Walnut Orb-weaver spider, Nuctenea umbratica

A modest list, but not bad for a very cold February afternoon, especially as all but two (Porcellio scaber and Anthocoris nemorum) of these invertebrates are new records for the Stiperstones area, according to the useful list compiled by Pete Boardman in 2010. I find it comforting that these many of these species have probably been happily living at The Hollies for many generations, over the centuries since the current hollies started growing.

The Hollies is a Shropshire Wildlife Trust reserve and SSSI, so thankfully its special character has been recognised and is being looked after. It's a shame that so many of the hollies have had to be fenced off, making it look rather like a tree zoo - presumably this is to prevent the trees being damaged by grazing stock. But the ancient hollies still work their magic, redolent of centuries of human interaction with the landscape. There's more about the history of The Hollies on Sara Bellis's blog, where she comments that in the past small boys would have been sent up the trees to collect the higher, less prickly leaves, as livestock feed. Since I was accompanied on my visit by a small boy in the shape of Kitenet jnr it's a shame I didn't think to put him to gainful employment for once ...

Links for Oxfordshire recorders' day

[These links were originally compiled for a workshop in Oxfordshire in Feb 2012, 
but may be of interest more widely.]

These are links to the various sites looked at during the online resources workshop at the Oxfordshire recorders' day, organised by TVERC on 25 February 2012. Quite a few of these have appeared in the blog before (e.g. citizen science, online identification), but they're all useful sites so no harm in repeating them.

Photos for identifying wildlife
Following discussion of the pros and cons of using digital photos for wildlife identification we spent some time exploring iSpot (you will be unsurprised to hear!), and what the site does to encourage proper documentation of photo-records and their identification. We also looked in on the iSpot identification keys.

Online recording
Next up was online recording, focusing on Indicia and Birdtrack. Like iSpot, Indicia is one of the projects from OPAL, and it provides a toolkit for adding online recording to an existing website. There are an increasing number of effective recording systems being set up with Indicia, including for the British Dragonfly Society and the BBC's version of the UK Ladybird Survey.

Birdtrack has been around for a while now, developed by the British Trust for Ornithology and partners, and it really is a superb way of making bird records useful both to you as recorder, and to the conservation organisations that can make use of your data. I've only recently started adding my bird records to the site (I'm not much of a birder, so it's not been a great loss to them!), and am really impressed with the way that Birdtrack handles a range of different types of recording, and provides excellent feedback.

Twitter, Facebook, Google+, blogs: time well-spent, or time, well, just spent?
We looked at just a few examples here including:

The Square Metre at TQ 78286 18846

• Mark Avery's genius for stimulating debate and making us think about conservation, farming and more
• Hagbourne Wildlife, a good example of a local area-based wildlife blog
• The Square Metre at TQ 78286 18846, my favourite biological recording blog ever
• Botanical Society of the British Isles on Facebook - a good example of how this should be done, regular updates, informative and entertaining

As for Twitter, just leap in and have a go. I'm @kitenet if you want to follow me. I haven't found how to make the most of Google+ yet, but I'm on there too.

Other resources

Finally, a mixed bag of other stuff:

• lots of mapping links on my Kitenet website - grid refs, gazetteers, GIS and other gadgets
• Nature Societies Online at the Natural History Museum - you'll be amazed how many wildlife-related groups there are in your county
• Biodiversity Heritage Library - great library of mostly older natural history and biodiversity science publications, mostly quite old, not only available as good quality scans but also searchable
• Instant Wild, a well-designed and fun citizen science project that asks you to identify mammals caught on camera from around the world - addictive and useful

Spot spotted, or not spotted?

The spot in question is Lempke's Gold Spot, a rather lovely moth named after the Dutch lepidopterist, B.J. Lempke, who I believe was the first to discover this species in Europe (it had long been known in the USA). In Britain it's mostly found in the northern half of the country, but there are a few records for the south.

© Jim Vargo at Moth Photographers Group via EoL

Earlier today, Roy Leverton (author of the excellent Enjoying Moths) contacted me, in my capacity as Berkshire county moth recorder, regarding a potential Berkshire record of Lempke's Gold Spot. This was published in a note by R.F. Bretherton, in the Entomologist's Record for 1966 (available via the Biodiversity Heritage Library). In the note Bretherton refers to discovering that a specimen from his garden in Cumnor Hill, near Oxford, in 1940 had turned out to be Lempke's Gold Spot, a species that had only recently been recognised as European at the time of the note.

I had no record for Lempke's Gold Spot on the Berkshire database, and the species is not included in Brian Baker's book on the county's moths either, so this could have constituted a new species, the 638th, for the county list - always an enticing prospect! However, the question arises why Baker did not include the record in his book; many of Bretherton's records were included, and Bretherton's moth collection went to Reading Museum on his death, the museum for which Baker was natural history curator for many years, and retained an active interest in after his retirement. 

So I am left wondering whether Baker saw the Lempke's Gold Spot record or specimen and rejected it, or whether it didn't get into his book because he was simply unaware of it. The 'normal' Gold Spot is very similar to Lempke's Gold Spot (sometimes needing dissection to distinguish the two), and in Bretherton's article he states that the specimen was of a worn individual, so there is an element of doubt.

What all this adds up to is that, unfortunately, the verdict has to be "not proven", and the idea of Lempke's Gold Spot being a Berkshire moth must remain an intriguing possibility. If only we could travel back to 1940 and have a look round at the habitats then available.

Wildlife, citizens, science - Darwin Festival Feb 2012

Here are some links to do with citizen science and (mostly) wildlife recording, compiled to support a 'Café Science' event I'm presenting at the Darwin Festival in Shrewsbury, 17 February 2012.

Citizen Science (CS) projects, entirely online:

• Herbaria at Home - museums and BSBI in an effective partnership to recruit help with digitising data from plant specimens (UK)
• Cornell bird identification - innovative project to get people to 'train' an online identification system (USA)
• WhaleFM - help categorise whale songs (international)
• Instant Wild - help identify mammals recorded on-camera (international)
• Zooniverse - collection of astronomical CS projects (universal)
• Mappiness - uses apps to get people to record how happy they are at particular times, intends to look at whether being out in green space improves happiness [of course it does!], among other aims (UK)

Real-world projects with clever online elements:

Thanks to XKCD

• Evolution Megalab from The Open University - main project has finished but you can still use and contribute to the website
• Nature's Calendar - you can contribute records of wildlife seasonal change, and also explore the records already online via some ingenious interactive maps (UK)
• OPAL surveys - well-designed environmental surveys with online data entry and analysis (UK)
• Your Wild Life - fun projects looking at wildlife (some of it at micro-organism level) in our homes and on our bodies - armpit biodiversity anyone? (USA)

CS record-breakers:

• Audubon Christmas Bird Count  - apparently the oldest CS project in the world, continuous run since 1900
• RSPB Big Garden Birdwatch - apparently the biggest CS project in the world, with over 600,000 participants counting over 10 million birds in 2011

Wildlife survey CS projects mentioned in the talk:

• Darwin Guide - excellent general guide to wildlife recording from the National Biodiversity Network
• Butterfly Conservation surveys
• UK Butterfly Monitoring Scheme
• BSBI Loddon Lily Survey plus axiophytes and other projects
• BTO/JNCC/RSPB Breeding Birds Survey
• Ancient Tree Hunt
• Wildflowers Count
• British Waterways Wildlife Survey (plus critique from Jeremy Biggs) 

Learning and skills:

• The botanical skills pyramid and FISCs
• Biological recording courses at Birmingham University - currently under threat of closure but hopefully can be re-introduced to a new habitat
• Field Studies Council
• OPAL iSpot from The Open University - help with wildlife identification from a range of very knowledgeable people

Other:

• Wildlife recorders: bingo conservationists? - not sure why this is in the BBC news this week, but it gives some wildlife recorders a chance to put their point of view, which can't be bad
• Lots more links on my Delicious pages