Tag Archives: biological records

Square-bashing: SS9073

02 Sunday Jul 2017

Posted by in fungi, insects, molluscs, nature, walks

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A few days ago I posted about my square-bashing adventure near Llanbeder, in Gwent. Hilary and I have now also square-bashed another under-biodiversity-recorded 1-km square, this time near St Brides Major in Glamorgan.

170702 Square-bashing SS9073 (2)

As the seagull flies we were within a kilometre of the sea and the geological substrate was very different, so the habitats we surveyed were more diverse. One public path led us down a heavily wooded driveway to an old house, another ran between the edge of that same woodland and fields sown with cereal crops (and there the hogweed was flowering which greatly improved my insect tally), and the third took us over paddocks of rough unimproved grassland, with patches of low rushes, all bordered by a wild old hedgerow.

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Interestingly, this time Hilary’s plant list was about 20% lower than that from our previous square (though she still had around 80 species), whereas my list of everything else was about the same percentage higher (at around 100 species of insects, fungi and lichens, molluscs, etc).

Square-bashing: ST3990

28 Wednesday Jun 2017

Posted by in fungi, insects, nature, walks

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I spent last Friday square-bashing with my friend Hilary, and what a brilliant day we had.

170628 ST3990 square-bashing (1)

For the uninitiated, square-bashing consists of taking a square kilometre that has very few existing biological records and walking the roads, tracks and paths through that square to see what you can find. Each month, my local biodiversity records centre SEWBReC publishes the details of just such a square in the counties they cover, Glamorgan and Gwent, in the hope that keen folks like Hilary and I will rectify the lack of records.

170628 ST3990 square-bashing (2)

Although the term square-bashing is not meant to be taken literally, we did have to bash our way through one field in our square kilometre, where the public footpath was completely overgrown (spot Hilary in the photo below), but on the whole the countryside was beautiful, with rolling farmed fields, old narrow lanes and, the best part, an ancient holloway (more on that in a future post).

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Hilary’s something of a whizz when it comes to plants so she recorded those and I did everything else – insects, fungi, birds, you name it! As I’m not a whizz at anything, I mostly take lots of photos and then have to work out the IDs when I get home, which takes time but helps me learn. I have just a couple of outstanding queries but reckon my total will come to around 80 and Hilary has about 90 plants on her list, so it was a very good result indeed. Here are some of my finds – can you identify them?

An under-recorded square kilometre

07 Friday Oct 2016

Posted by in insects, nature

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After our morning’s biodiversity recording session at Porthkerry and a rather scrummy pub lunch, our SEWBReC team took up the challenge of how many species we could discover in a one-kilometre square that borders Cardiff Airport, a square where only 15 species of anything had previously been recorded. Well, even a desert has more life in it than that, and we had fields and country lanes edged with hedgerows to explore so off we set.

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Some of the hedgerows had recently been savagely trimmed and, though sunny, it was blowing a gale so conditions weren’t exactly perfect. But we are a dedicated team! We scanned and we scoured, we probed and we combed, we turned over and peered under, we inspected and we scrutinised. And at the end of two hours we had a preliminary list of 85 species, with some uncertainties to be verified, some ambiguities to be resolved and some experts to be consulted. What a thoroughly enjoyable, eminently satisfying day it was!

Each month SEWBReC provides maps and information about poorly recorded 1km squares in south east Wales, in the hope of filling in the gaps in their maps. If you live in the area, or even if you’re just visiting, you can help fill those gaps. See here for more information.

Bioblitzing at Porthkerry Country Park

06 Thursday Oct 2016

Posted by in nature, parks

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As I volunteer on the Mary Gillham Archive Project, which is hosted by SEWBReC (the South East Wales Biodiversity Records Centre), I got invited along to SEWBReC’s staff outing yesterday. And what do records centre staff do for a staff outing? Why we go looking for more biodiversity records, of course! I was in my element, and it was so nice being with like-minded people who also spend a lot of time standing and staring at bushes and trees, and can take an hour to progress a hundred metres. For once, I wasn’t the ‘strange’ one!
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We spent the morning by the seaside at Porthkerry Country Park, on the south Wales coast near Barry, a first visit for me to this beautiful place, which ‘contains 220 acres of woodland and meadows in a sheltered valley that leads to a pebble beach and spectacular cliffs’. We barely scratched the surface, so I will certainly be heading back to explore further. Our list of species found currently stands at 93 but we have a few more to check so I feel sure we’ll push our total over the 100 mark before we’re finished. The sun shone on the recording team at Porthkerry!

‘Dedicated Naturalist’: Scientific names

05 Thursday May 2016

Posted by in 'Dedicated Naturalist' Project, nature

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A snippet from my volunteer work on the ‘Dedicated Naturalist’ Project, helping to decipher and digitise, record and publicise the life’s work of naturalist extraordinaire, Dr Mary Gillham.

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When project officer Al Reeve sent round his monthly volunteer newsletter, he attached this image of the many and varied scientific names we volunteers have been typing up from Dr Mary Gillham’s records. It makes a pretty picture but these things are the stuff of volunteer nightmares! Seriously, what was Linnaeus thinking when he invented binomial nomenclature?

Take, for example, the Eurasian wren, a delicate and tiny bird but its scientific name, Troglodytes troglodytes, makes it sounds like a huge stomping dinosaur. Admittedly, the double-barrel names are easier to remember. There’s Pica pica the Eurasian magpie, Buteo buteo the Common buzzard and Anser anser the Greylag goose.

160505 wren greylag thrush

Troglodytes troglodytes, Anser anser and Turdus philomelos

I feel sorry for the rather unfortunately named Turdus family of true thrushes. There are more than 50 family members, with names like Turdus pilaris the Fieldfare, Turdus merula the Blackbird, and Turdus philomelos the melodic Song Thrush.

Then there are the plants with girls’ names, or should that be girls with plant names? Whenever I type Prunella (as in Prunella vulgaris, the herb Selfheal) I always think of Prunella Scales, the actress who played John Cleese’s exceedingly patient wife in Fawlty Towers, and, though it’s not spelt the same, Silene dioica, the pretty wildflower Red campion, reminds me of singer Celine Dion. And there are plenty more: Veronica, Iris, Lotus, Viola …

160505 Herb Paris

Then there are the misnomers. You might quite reasonably expect names beginning with Trifolium (tri = three, folio = leaf) to have three leaves, except that plants are often not true to their names: witness Trifolium repens, which can, if you’re lucky, be a four leaf clover! Or there’s Paris quadrifolia, the supposedly four-leaf Herb Paris (shown above), which can have from 5 to 8 leaves.

It’s enough to drive a volunteer to drink, so I’ll end with my favourite cocktail, Sambucus nigra. Cheers!

You can follow our progress with this project on Facebook and on Twitter. A website will follow soon.