Tag Archives: SEWBReC

Traveller’s joy

22 Friday Sep 2017

Posted by in flowers, nature, plants, wildflowers

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The joy of this plant is that you see it wherever you travel in Britain. See what I did there?

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Clematis vitalba is most commonly called Traveller’s-joy but you might also know it as Old-man’s-beard, Father Christmas, Smokewood or Woodbine. Its feathery white seed heads are its most distinctive feature, making it easy to recognise and identify, and this really is a plant that you’ll see draped over hedges and fences almost everywhere in Britain.

Yet SEWBReC, the South East Wales Biodiversity Records Centre, have revealed that Traveller’s-joy is not well recorded: they have less than 2000 records in their database. And so they have made this plant their species of the month for September. If you spot Traveller’s-joy this month (or next, or the month after), please make a point of recording it with your local records centre – almost every county in Britain has its own records centre where you can log your biological sightings and those of you based in south-east Wales can find out more about biological recording, and the species of the month, on SEWBReC’s website.

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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.

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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.

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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?

I’m a mentee!

23 Sunday Apr 2017

Posted by in nature, plants, walks, wildflowers

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Actually, I became a mentee a few weeks ago but yesterday was my first outing with my mentor and other members of the Glamorgan Botany Group. My plant knowledge is abysmal and I felt I needed to remedy that so when SEWBReC (the South East Wales Biodiversity Records Centre) announced that, as part of the Heritage Lottery-funded Mary Gillham Archive Project, they would be running a Botany Mentorship Scheme ‘to encourage the sharing of knowledge from experienced botanists to enthusiastic beginners’, I put my hand up.

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As SEWBReC’s announcement said, ‘Mary spent her lifetime sharing her ecological knowledge including many years as an Extra Mural Lecturer at Cardiff University, so the inclusion of a Botany Mentorship Scheme in the project will carry on her passion for teaching others about the wildlife of south east Wales’. Lady Luck was smiling on me the day the mentees were selected and I am now one of a handful of keen amateurs with a steep (or so it seems to me) learning curve in front of me.

Yesterday, with my mentor and eight other enthusiastic plant people, I stomped around some of the less-well-explored and under-recorded green spaces of Barry, a town on the south Wales coast, examining and recording plant species. My mentor and walk-mates were welcoming, friendly, and generous in sharing their extensive knowledge, and it was a splendid, if somewhat overwhelming day. I have a great deal to learn but I’m looking forward to the challenge immensely.

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A view over Barry

Introduction to fungal microscopy

05 Sunday Feb 2017

Posted by in fungi, nature

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Yesterday I dipped my toes into the fungal microscopy waters and it was good! In fact, it was more than good. Funded by the Wales Biodiversity Partnership, hosted and organised by SEWBReC, and led by Mr Glamorgan Fungi Mike Bright, ably assisted by SEWBReC’s fungi whizz Amy Hicks, the whole day was simply excellent!

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One of the most frustrating things about fungi can be trying to identify them and/or differentiate between visually similar species. Now I have the basic skills needed to do this. I’m under no illusions, though – I do realise that IDing my finds will still be difficult: I might not have collected a good specimen, I might not be able to find what I need under the microscope, I might not be able to find the information in books or online to compare with what I’m seeing, and, something that I hadn’t expected, the floaters I have in my right eye (a problem that comes from the vitreous gel in my eye hardening with age) interfere with what I see down the microscope.

So, I’m not rushing out to spend hundreds of pounds on a good ’scope just yet. Luckily, as a regular biodiversity recorder, I’m able to borrow the equipment they hold at SEWBReC, my local biodiversity records centre. Now I just need to find my first sample to identify!

Many thanks to my friend Graham Watkeys for the photo of me studiously peering down the ’scope, and sorry for the poor quality of my ’scope images – I now know photos of microscope camera photos shown on a laptop screen don’t reproduce very well.

Holly leaf-miner

10 Saturday Dec 2016

Posted by in insects, nature, trees

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Following on from yesterday’s post where I (hopefully) sent you all on a quest to find the Holly parachute fungus, I thought I’d kill two biological records with one outing, and also get you to look for another species related specifically to holly.

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This is the Holly leaf-miner (Phytomyza ilicis), a small fly that lays its eggs inside the leaves of holly. ‘Inside’ may sound strange, but holly leaves are relatively thick and leathery so, once the eggs hatch, they make the perfect home for the fly’s larvae, which live out their lives feeding on the flesh of the leaves and making a little home for themselves in the process. Their feeding creates multi-coloured blotches on the leaves so, although you’ll probably never see the fly and probably not even the larvae (unless you slice open a leaf at the right time of year), you can always tell where they’ve been. Once they’ve eaten their fill, the larvae pupate inside their leafy homes, then open a small escape hole once their transformation is complete and fly away to start the process all over again.

Co-incidentally, the Holly leaf-miner is species of the month (really, two months – November and December) with SEWBReC, the South East Wales Biodiversity Records Centre. Like yesterday’s Holly parachute fungus, there are few biological records of the leaf-miner but it is almost certainly just under-recorded because, once you start looking for those tell-tale blotches, you quickly discover it’s almost everywhere. So, get looking and recording!

Fungi Friday: Diplocarpa bloxamii

18 Friday Nov 2016

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Considering I am exceedingly short-sighted, I am amazed at how many exceedingly tiny fungi I have been finding lately. More on those soon but today I want to share a rare one I found in one of my local Cardiff parks last week. In fact, my find is only the second record for Wales and was the first record in Wales in 42 years and 3 days. As Kew mycologist Brian Douglas wrote, ‘it’s not bad coming second to Derek Reid, ex-head of Kew Mycology’. Needless to say, I’m delighted, though I suspect this fungus is under-recorded rather than as rare as those statistics make it sound!

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Diplocarpa bloxamii (no common name) is an ascomycete, a cup fungus, with an olive-black disc-shaped cup growing on a short stem. The external surface of the cup is pustulate (think coarse pimples, without the actual pus) and it has light brown hairs sprouting both from the pustules and around the edge of the cup, which is much lighter, almost beige, in colour. The cups are tiny – no more than 5mm across – I actually had my glasses off and my face about 15cms from the decaying piece of log, looking at something else, when I spotted them.

Of course, I had no idea what they were but took some macro photos to post that evening on Facebook. Luckily, Brian Douglas spotted my post, alerted me to what they might be, sent me some literature, and had me heading back to the woods the next day for a sample. Talk about looking for a needle in a haystack! Fortunately, I’ve been training myself to remember where I spot things so that I can later record my findings, so I found them again quite quickly.

I am very grateful to Brian for his help in determining the identity of my little fungi and to Amy Hicks, of SEWBReC, who very kindly undertook the microscope work needed to confirm their ID and provided me with the stunning photographs (above) that resulted from her work.

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Fungi Friday: Stump puffballs

28 Friday Oct 2016

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I’m a dedicated wildlife recorder, inputting my sightings of flora and fauna into the database of my local records centre, SEWBReC (the South East Wales Biodiversity Records Centre). Each month the team at SEWBReC nominates a species that is poorly recorded in their system, in that hope that recorders like me will search high and low to help augment their records. The reason is that if record numbers are low, you can’t tell whether a species is endangered or just under-recorded, so it’s important to record even the most common things.

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The October species of the month is a case in point. The Stump puffball (Lycoperdon pyriforme) is really common throughout Britain, yet the SEWBReC database had only 167 records at the start of the month. Well, I can tell you it will have a whole lot more by the end of October, because I’ve seen them almost everywhere I go and I’ve been photographing and recording them all. It’s the only British puffball to grow on wood so it’s easy to identify, and it often grows in large colonies – as one fungi expert put it, it’s ‘the banana of the fungi world, its bunches create impressive vistas’.

For more on SEWBReC’s species of the month, see here. If you live in the area, or even if you’re just visiting, you can help by recording your sightings.

An under-recorded square kilometre

07 Friday Oct 2016

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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

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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!

Bioblitzing Cwm Saerbren

27 Saturday Aug 2016

Posted by in birds, fungi, insects, nature, plants, wildflowers

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Each summer my local biological records centre, SEWBReC, runs a series of biological recording field days, partly to introduce members of the public to the world of biological recording, allowing them to rub shoulders with wildlife experts and learn species identification skills, and partly to record the biodiversity of particular areas. Last Thursday I went along to the field day-come-bioblitz at the Cwm Saerbren Woodland, adjacent to the small town of Treherbert at the top of the Rhondda Fawr Valley.

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This assumed unicorn was the star of the show!

Though the turnout from the locals was disappointing (not a single person!) and despite the sometimes heavy rain (a common feature up the Valleys), we had a great day. With the SEWBReC crew, a couple of guys from Natural Resources Wales, and a few of us volunteers from the Mary Gillham Archives Project, we stomped around the trails of Cwm Saerbren, recording all we saw. And, after meeting up back at the town to identify and write up our afternoon list and then filling up on hot chips from the local takeaway shop, we also got out with the bat recorder and had moth-attracting lights running to see what flying critters we might find. All up, once everything is IDed, I reckon our list will be well over 200 species. Not bad for a day’s work!