Pan-species listing milestones
Jonty Denton’s still not letting up, with 289 species added since mid-May taking his record-breaking list through 10,500 to stand at 10,535.
Dave Gibbs isn’t ready to submit an update yet but has added about 250 species during 2011 and reckons he’ll get to 10,000 by about the end of 2012.
Graeme Lyons and Martin Harvey have both broken 3,500 during the year. Graeme retains a slender lead.
Jon Newman, Steve Gale and Sarah Patton have all had very good years and all broken through 3,000 during the autumn. Sarah has pulled well clear though, by finishing the job of gleaning records from old notebooks to take her list to 3,327. Jon and Steve are neck-and-neck on 3,013 and 3,012 respectively!
Seth Gibson has just passed his target of 2,500 and has his sights set on 3,000.
Mark Skevington will be passing 2,000 before much longer.
Most of the pan-species listers have been spurred into tackling new groups, and fungi especially have been a rich source of new species, along with mosses, liverworts and beetles. Despite this fine example set by others, I seem to have spent most of the year concentrating more and more on beetles. Despite the fact that I’ve only seen a little over half the British and Irish beetle fauna and there’s still almost 2,000 species to go, it does seem to be getting harder and harder to find new ones – and more and more rewarding each time I do!
Confessions of a pan-species lister …
Why do I want to see a big list of species and what makes me think other people might also want to be pan-species listers? I’ve had to think hard about the answers to these questions in recent months following the Twat-gate affair and various thought-provoking and satirical blogs from the North Downs and beyond.
I get a thrill every time I see a species for the first time: it’s a tick! It’s a unique and unrepeatable moment, whether you go on to become intimately familiar with the species or never see one again, the first encounter is usually the most memorable.
8th June 2008
I have to identify the things I see. I know there are naturalists who can appreciate wildlife without feeling the need to identify it. And I admire those who can enjoy nature for its purely aesthetic appeal. I try to do this when I’m abroad, where I’ve little hope of being able to identify everything, but not very successfully. For me, identifying wildlife is as much of a buzz as seeing it, if not more so.
I love making discoveries. So I’m always keen to be out looking for wildlife and keen to scrutinise what I find to check for anything unusual. I’ve discovered 5 beetles new to Britain so far. One of these (Acupalpus maculatus) had already been collected on several occasions but everyone had overlooked it as A. parvulus, assuming that they’d found a species already on the British list. Even in my utterly unremarkable back garden, I have discovered numerous beetles new to Bedfordshire.
Acupalpus maculatus by John Read
With pan-species listing, I’ve found a way of enjoying the thrill of seeing things for the first time, of making discoveries and finding rarities. In some ways it’s the opposite of twitching. I don’t have to chase after anything: I can just go out in the field locally whenever I like and be sure that I will see something I’ve never seen before! Despite a certain nostalgia about twitching birds in the 80s, I’m mightily glad to be able to get my nat hist kicks much closer to home now. And at the same time, most importantly of all, I can make a contribution to conservation and to the promotion of natural history.
All-round naturalists are important. There are about 70,000 species in Britain and most are poorly-known and poorly-recorded. Lots of birders in recent years have been spreading their interests into butterflies, dragonflies, moths, orchids, cetaceans and many other groups, generating lots of valuable records. I think it would be a terrific boost to natural history and conservation if this trend continues into ever more neglected groups of British wildlife. I have entered all 50,000+ of my invertebrate records into my MapMate database, all of which I make available to national recording schemes, county records centres, etc.
I was interested in wildlife from a young age but, like most keen naturalists, it was birds that first got me really fired up. I used to love everything about twitching: ringing the grapevine, driving through the night, service stations at 3 am full of familiar faces, dawn in some new and distant part of the country, once-in-a-lifetime birds from Siberia or North America. I’ve hitched to many parts of Britain for birds including Shetland and Scilly, and for a while in the 80s I didn’t miss much. But to be a good twitcher you need commitment, deep pockets and a flexible lifestyle. I am not a good twitcher but twitching has given me some great experiences (and still occasionally does!). It was a brilliant gateway into nat hist for me and a superb training ground for developing rigorous ID skills. But I really wish I’d cottoned on to the rest of biodiversity at a younger age. I didn’t identify a single beetle until I was 22!
Conservation in Britain is a democracy. For much of the early part of the 20th century it was a two-party system and many of our NNRs, SSSIs and Wildlife Trust reserves are primarily of botanical interest. But in recent decades, the ruling party has been the birdwatchers. They do their best to cater for other wildlife but inevitably birds come first. Ultimately, the more people in this country who care about each and every species of British invertebrate, the more chance we have of conserving them and their habitats. And they need all the help they can get.
I wish I’d been born to be the next David Attenborough. I wasn’t, but if I can help a few more people to get more enjoyment out of Britain’s wildlife and to put more back in, I will be a happy man.
Pan-species listing: the race for 10,000
There’s a good article in today’s Sunday Telegraph about pan-species listing and our two top listers: Jonty Denton and David Gibbs. There’s a few good laughs in the article but it is also a tribute to their contribution to British natural history and conservation. And there’s an encouraging editorial here.
For more about pan-species listing and to see the full rankings, click here. And to read the recent BirdGuides webzine article, click here.
