NORTH DOWNS & BEYOND

Beddington Sewage Farm once again provided today's entertainment. The promised rain did not materialise, so therefore a diurnal wader and tern passage did not materialise either - apart from the two Barwits that flew through when I had deserted the lakeside and was off doing my botanical survey... I'm getting a reputation as an unlucky birder down at the farm. It seems that whenever I wander off something happens (Bearded Tit, White-fronted Goose and Waxwing have all appeared briefly only to depart before I have returned) - all of them are all good local birds. All was not lost though, as my assistant botanical recorder, Frankie 'Hoary Cress' Prater showed me a weevil on the nettles. I even keyed it out and feel confident in naming it Phyllobius pomaceus . That's the boy in the photograph above. The rest of the Beddington Bird Group are taking part in the annual bird race tomorrow, whereas I will be attending a barbeque in Shooter's Hill. My only decision t...

This pan-species listing lark (no pun intended) can seriously wreck your natural history 'blueprint'. When I 'only' looked at birds, I was, without any complications, a birder. Identification of what I saw was a fairly straightforward matter and the literature needed to take on the more complicated species was both accessible and plentiful. When I turned my attention to lepidoptera, butterflies were few (and obvious) and moths - as long as I took a circuitous path around the micros - was once again aided by clear identification guides. Even the micros were being increasingly serviced by excellent reference material on the web and in print. Botany came a little later, but I was fortunate in having an embarrasment of books to help me out with those tricky crucifers and sedges. To sum up, with a little patience I could bird, moth and botanise without the need for much head-scratching when coming up with correct identification (although there are always some exceptions....

This is Adela reaumurella , a fairly common longhorn moth that I found in good numbers at Ranmore Common yesterday, along with three Hawfinches (click on the image to appreciate this little beauty all the more). Nearby, on Denbigh's Hillside, a good selection of butterflies included Dingy Skipper, Grizzled Skipper and Green Hairstreak. This late April has felt more like high July, although the pessimist within me predicts jumpers and thermals will be required once more within the next few weeks.

This nicely marked Seraphim came to the MV last night, along with the common longhorn moth Nematopogan swammerdamella , the later a new species for the garden.

After a couple of recent incorrect identifications (of a grass and a spider), I'm a more wary individual. This morning I approached the moth trap with an air of uncertainty. As far as macro moths go, I'm on fairly safe ground. Micro moths are a bit more of a challenge, but I do have accessibility to all of the literature that I need. Other invertebrates are a different matter. Take spiders for instance. I have a copy of the Collins Field Guide to the Spiders of Britain and Northern Europe by Michael Roberts. That, to my small mind, must be enough of a reference to confidently identify anything that comes my way (save for a foreign stowaway in a box of bananas). My assumption is wrong. I've struggled to match the living spider, or a decent macro image of one, with the plates in the guide. Last week's Thursley spider was a case in point. It could be that all spiders are highly variable and that students of the arachnidae look towards other features to get a correct iden...

I need to thank Graeme Lyons and Ann Sankey for stopping me from making a couple of schoolboy errors. My trip to Thursley last Sunday had me posting pictures of a grass (I thought it might be Early Meadow-grass), which they both corrected to Annual Meadow-grass; and a spider, which Graeme has put me right on - it is in fact Marpissa muscosa. I take one step forward, and two back...

In his excellent book 'Blood Knots' , Luke Jennings wrote: "The late Bernard Venables, author of the classic Mr Crabtree fishing books, used to say that there are three stages to the angler's evolution. To begin with, as a child, you just want to catch fish - any fish. Then you move to the stage where you want to catch big fish. And finally, with nothing left to prove, you reach a place where it's the manner of the catch that counts, the rigour and challenge of it, at which point the whole thing takes on an intellectual and perhaps even a philosophical cast. I tried this out on a pike-angling friend of mine, the rock guitarist Rene Berg. 'It's like with women, then? he said thoughtfully." I think that we could legitimately alter that last comment to "It's like with birding, then?"