PSL - the debate

From my folder marked 'Mystery Pictures' - best left to the experts...

He may not have kicked over a hornet's nest exactly, but Seth Gibson's recent blog post on Pan-species Listing (PSL) (you can read it here) has certainly stirred up a bit of debate on social media (including a blog post from Alastair Forsyth which you can read here). This is my contribution to the conversation.

I think I can safely say that I was in at the start of the whole PSL movement. I had, just like Seth, independently started to collate a list of every living organism that I had recored in the UK and, just like Seth, this was primarily a lumping together of my bird, plant, butterfly, moth and dragonfly lists plus a handful of obvious others (ie Stag Beetle, Pike, Fox, you get the picture). My non-core identification library was scant and woefully inadequate, but it was all that I had to use - remember, these were pre-internet days! If I saw a wasp, fly, beetle or fungus, I took my basic identification guide off of the shelf and identified my specimen by matching it up to the closest illustration in the book. I might even glance at the wording alongside just to make sure that the fly I was identifying in my Surrey back garden wasn't only recorded from the Scottish highlands, but by and large it was a case of 'picture match'. Nothing that I recorded away from my core-interests were sent in to be adjudicated as it was all a bit of fun - and it was fun. I could be lying in bed thinking about when we used to flick Common Swifts with a mist net and then recall the flat-flies that used to crawl over their bodies and BINGO! Another lifer was added to the fledgling list.

Some time later, when we entered the era of the internet and a burgeoning social media scene, somebody (I think it was Mark Telfer) put it out there that there were others like me, who tried to identify everything. We came together. A league table was created. I was in the top 10 (and not down in the mid-50s as I now am...)

Fast forward a few years. There have been PSL field meetings. A PSL site was created and is now hosted and maintained by those wonderful people at BUBO (which is fantastic - you needn't have to refer to hundreds of notebooks to look at your lists). There is a league table. You can see what everybody on it has seen and what they haven't seen. You could spend hours on it. But I digress.

I had a few reality checks early on. The first was going on the original PSL field trip in West Sussex back in 2012. It soon became apparent to me that I was an imposter. I might have known my birds and plants, I might have had a good handle on macro moths, but these people seemed to know everything. Not a moss, beetle or fly was left unidentified, and if I piped up with a plant identification it was only of interest to those gathered because of a possible leaf-mine, rust or that it was host to a specific beetle. I went home with a notebook full of Latin names (phonetically written) but no clue in reality. 

Soon after I started to spend autumn days looking at fungi, especially at Ebernoe Common in West Sussex. It had a fantastic time, sorting through Waxcaps and all manner of brackets. I then bumped into a proper mycologist. He took one look at my field guide, another at my list and explained that most of the species on the British list were not even in my book and that my list was full of stuff that I really needed to take spore prints from and others would need chemicals to create spot-tests to confirm what they really were. I looked at him, at my book, at my list and realised not for the first time that my fungi life list was full of holes.

Beetles. Flies. Bees. Wasps. Bugs. Spiders. I could go on. Are my PSL lists of these groups squeaky clean, full of 100% correct identifications? No. Never in a million years. But are my PSL lists of these groups full of records made in good faith? Absolutely. Then why carry on, why bother with the whole thing if - as is blindingly obvious - that you need microscopes, chemicals, thousands of pounds worth of identification keys, field equipment beyond binoculars and camera, plus a brain the size of the London Planetarium. I'll go back to an earlier statement I made - because it's fun.

I'm not a professional. My identifications are not part of any survey being carried out for money. My records are not being treated as scientific fact. My results don't matter beyond entertaining me. I do send in my bird records via BirdTrack, my plant records to the Surrey Botanical Society and my lepidoptera records to iRecord. These are all peer reviewed. Any notable sighting will be backed up by a description (old school) or photograph.

Seth (and Alastair) are both highly competent field men, way way higher up the natural history ladder than I will ever be. I've spent time with both of them in the past as I have with Graeme Lyons (who is referenced in their blog posts). In some ways they are all coming at this subject from a different place to me. I largely agree with what has been written but also can see why the PSL movement is being allowed to trundle on gathering observers by the field full. More eyes, more records, more interest. More mistakes? Undoubtably. But I think it will be a small price to pay in the long run.