My Biological Recording
As far as my memory tells me, I have always had an interest in wildlife. My earliest recollections are of the feral Pigeons that congregated on the roofs of the houses around the back garden of my first home in Mortlake, London. There was one of that pinky brown colour that we named Ginger.
Then, when I was about three or four we moved to Camberwell (still in London). The house was across the road from a park, and there were Wood Pigeons, House Sparrows, Jays and Blackbirds. The song of the Blackbird still takes me back to those days.
Each year we had a holiday in the country, and that meant long walks, and wild flowers to see, and birds to watch. In later years my mother remembered that one summer we heard what must have been Corncrakes, though I have no recollection of this. But there were two things in the countryside, often in abundance, that I didn’t see much of in our part of London. Feathers, and Conkers. I used to collect both avidly. My parents put up with this hobby, but I do remember once, after staying with my grandfather, and having made a particularly large collection of conkers, saying, when we were halfway home “Oh, we’ve forgotten the conkers”. I think my mother’s “Oh dear, what a pity” was said somewhat tongue in cheek.
My parents both encouraged my interest in natural history. They had an old brass microscope that we used to look at a wide variety of things – I remember the fascination of seeing rotifers in drops of water from the bird bath. We kept caterpillars from the Privet hedge in jam jars (I seem to recall that they were a species of Ermine Moth). My father, interested in electronics, built some sort of microphone device and allowed a caterpillar to walk over it – I was fascinated by the sound of amplified caterpillar footsteps.
I suppose my first actual biological recording was filling in I-Spy books – I must see if they are still somewhere about the house and if they hold any interesting records! I did make New Year’s Resolutions to keep notes of my wildlife observations from time to time, but, like many a resolution, they did not last very long!
When I was twelve, we moved to rural Norfolk. My father’s new parish was quite large, and the Rectory was large, likewise the garden. This was heaven for a young boy interested in wildlife. The new bird table we put up immediately attracted Coal Tits, Blue Tits, Great Tits, Nuthatches, House Sparrows, Tree Sparrows, Robins and Starlings. House Sparrows and Starlings nested in the eaves; there were Great Spotted Woodpeckers and Green Woodpeckers in the garden, as well as Treecreepers. I used to watch these from my bedroom window, as they worked their way up the trees in the drive – once the Treecreeper had got to the top of the trunk of one tree, it would fly to the bottom of the next and begin working its way up the trunk again. One day one flew in through the sitting-room window, and I managed to catch it and release it outside. It was wonderful to see such a beautiful bird close up. Swallows and House Martins used to feed in great dizzying swirls over the lawn in the summer. Swallows nested around the house (and once, through an open window, inside the house). The House Martins preferred other houses in the village, but always came to feed over the lawn, in the shelter of the large trees that surrounded it.
And there were mammals as well; Hedgehogs and of course mice, voles and shrews, which our various cats kindly brought in for us. Some we released outside, but I suspect that the cats were the source of the mice that lived upstairs, and kept me awake in winter by dragging Conkers (yes, I still collected Conkers) across the bare boards to some secret hoard in the attics. Eventually I tired of the noise, and set a trap, and was surprised to capture a Yellow-necked Mouse, not a common species in Norfolk. Bats flew around the garden – Pipistrelles, as far as I could tell, and there were Long-eared Bats in the church next door. When we first came to Norfolk there were still a few Red Squirrels about, but they were replaced by Greys, which used to scamper about on the roof of the old barn, and pinch the Hazelnuts from the bushes.
There were Slow-worms on the lawn, and one of the cats regularly caught lizards (one a year for several years). Occasionally there were Frogs in the small pond, but it wasn’t really large enough to sustain them.
Invertebrates by the score, naturally. Swarms of thunderflies in the summer, and flying ants in great carpets in the old scullery. Wasps, of course, especially at jam-making time, and in later years Hornets banging against the bathroom window, attracted by the light.
There were plants as well! The garden contained mainly cultivated species (including those Conker trees!), but the field at the bottom of the garden, locally known as The Park, was unimproved pasture bordering the River Tas, and kept me happy for hours, prowling around with a flower book, looking for new discoveries. Green-veined Orchid was probably my ‘best’ find.
With all this on my door-step, no wonder I was interested in biological recording. As my friend Bill says “How can anyone not be interested in wildlife?”
University followed school, and studying Ecological Science improved my identification skills. One summer vacation, I had to spend four weeks working for an “approved organisation”. I went to Monks Wood, working in the Woodland Section, under Dick Steele. I spent much of the time filling in woodland survey cards. On my first day I was shown round the buildings by the Station Secretary. He led me down one corridor and said “This is the Biological Records Centre; I shouldn’t come here on your own, they’re a bit strange down here.”
Then, after graduation, I spent a year in the Geography Department working on various projects and was introduced to computing. One project involved producing parish maps for the whole of Britain. Boxes and boxes and boxes of 80 column cards, reams of line-printer output! This led to a ‘real’ job, at the Biological Records Centre at Monks Wood, and the rest, as they say, is history.
Written by Henry Arnold