NORTH DOWNS & BEYOND

Pan-listing fever found me looking at a photograph of a moss (above) that I took on Sunday (at Stourhead in Wiltshire) and deciding, rightly or wrongly, that it must be Brachythecium rutabulana , a type of feather-moss. As with all such groups, whose species number hundreds and can be bewilderingly similar, my declaration of identification is somewhat a leap of faith. I can also reveal that I also had an armchair tick this evening - I was reading about rotifers (go and look it up) and was pleased to find out that there is a common species, Philodina roseola , that lives in water butts and bird baths that has a habit of turning the water in the latter red. This often happens in our bird bath and I have wondered what it is that magically makes the water a living rusty soup. Now I know. Pan-list: 2626 (until someone cleverer than me tells me what the moss really is).

Please read Mark Telfer's account of his setting up of the pan-species listing league table, together with a rough set of rules. I am currently languishing towards the bottom of the top ten and unless I get myself sorted out I will find it difficult to progress, as most of those above me are professional biologists! However, the chances of adding to my list are great, as I still have plenty of avenues to mine. If you tot your list up and it is over 2,000, why not drop Mark an email. I have, in the past, refered to this listing as 'all-taxa', but pan-listing is now the prefered name. Go and start counting yours...

I have an increasing worry that very soon, the only places where we can hope to see wildlife (beyond the stinging nettle - blue tit - large white suite of common species) are going to be nature reserves. These will be behind fences, the other side of ditches or out-of-bounds to us all together. As unprotected land is either built upon, ploughed up, left to scrub over or not managed for its special inhabitants, so the area that is left in the UK that is able to support a varied wildlife will contract. This will mean that natural corridors for wildlife to move along to re-colonise abandoned areas or re-invigorate a shrinking gene pool will be closed for good. What 'good' land is left will struggle to maintain healthy populations. It all seems so likely and so depressing. Most recent atlas's published for our wildlife seems to tell the same story - of contracting range and of threatened populations. Some of this however may be skewed by my living in the south. No doubt if you ...

The latest in an increasingly frequent line of 'natural history books that I have obtained' is the snappily titled 'Provisional Atlas of the UK's Larger Moths' brought to you by those really useful people at Butterfly Conservation. It costs £20 (plus postage and packing) and the only bad news is that the special offer that was on last week has now ended. If you have sent in any moth records to your county recorder since 2000 then you can play the 'spot my dot' game, where you work out if one of the dots on any given map of any given species is totally down to you. I reckon that I have two - for Striped Hawk-moth and Blair's Mocha from my back garden. In reality there may be more - after all, even common species might have been missing purely because nobody else thought that they were worth mentioning. The maps are fascinating, revealing the winners and unfortunately losers in moth populations. The maps only reveal distribution and not numbers, but every...

I'm still reading Patrick Barkham's excellent 'The Butterfly Isles' and mention has just been made of butterfly swarming. Apart from his own incredible experience with Heath Fritillary (1300+ at Blean Woods!), he mentions examples from the golden age of the Victorian gentleman lepidopterist, when clouds of butterflies blotted out the sun - really. I too have been lucky enough to witness such spectacles: 9 August 1978, Beddington SF, Surrey Thousands of Small and Essex Skippers emerged en masse across the heavily vegetated sludge lagoon banks, creating a golden orange haze at waist height. 24 July 1992, Middleton, West Sussex As I drove alongside a large field (crop unknown) I was staggered to realise that the white mist hanging over it was in fact tens of thousands of 'white' butterflies. I reckoned that they were all Large and Small Whites and it was simply staggering. 28 July 1997, Bude, Cornwall A walk along the cliff top heading north revealed thousands of G...

The Butterfly Isles by Patrick Barkham is my current read. It is a book that informs, entertains and makes you think about why we take such an interest in the natural world around us. I’m a sucker for any well-written natural history literature and this is definitely one that comes into that category. It's got me all wistful for butterflies again. I can normally expect to see one by the end of February, usually an individual flushed out of hibernation by a spot of shed tidying or a shaft of warming sunlight. In most years the honour will go to a Red Admiral, a Small Tortoiseshell, a Peacock or a Brimstone. On one mild mid-February day several years ago, I recorded both Small Tortoiseshell and a Brimstone – a double flutterby start to the year! The book has also made me realise that there are species, within easy travelling distance, that I should go and see before its too late. I haven’t seen Duke of Burgundy, nor Glanville Fritillary, Lulworth Skipper or Heath Fritillary. I re...

Walking into work this morning (I normally drive) I found not one, but two Waxwing flocks. Both were in Cheam and both were enormous - well, three and two respectively. That'll do for me. My next trick will be an Arctic Redpoll mobbing a Snowy Owl that is distracted by a Gyr Falcon passing overhead. Three good North Downs ticks there!