All is not well in the Golden Age
When I was four years old I was lent to a neighbour for a few days. She took me ‘fishing’ (with a pond net) to the steelworks-polluted tidal drain that runs through Winteringham, North Lincolnshire, and apologised that we only caught shrimps – Gammarus duebeni, though I can’t claim to have known it at the time. I assured her these were much more interesting than fish, and that is still my view 48 years later.
At age 10 I became apprentice to local ornithologist and wildlife artist Miles Hopper, who was a huge influence on my views of wildlife and the countryside. I was hooked into proper biological recording, with grid references, record cards and everything, at a Scunthorpe Museum meeting in 1973, by the Lincolnshire mollusc recorder John Redshaw. The first specimens I sent him produced a new vice-county record (Ashfordia granulata), and it made me realise that not everything is yet known about which species occur where. Consequently identification keys started to accumulate in the bookcase.
There is the attraction of a treasure hunt in the identification of a specimen: the couplets of a key form the trail of clues, the fascination of seeing the tiny distinguishing structures on, say, the post-abdomen of a waterflea or the mouthparts of a water beetle make the process enjoyable, and there is the final prize of creating new information in the form of a unique biological record.
Ashfordia Granulata copyright Ilija Vukomanovic
I wish I could cite contribution to wildlife conservation as a motivating factor, but increasingly it feels like recording the type and position of the Titanic’s deckchairs as conservation slides into translocations, reintroductions and support for the tourist industry. Contrary to the prevailing view, I believe we are in a Golden Age of British natural history, with more active naturalists and more intensive study of more groups of wildlife than ever before. Unfortunately, there is an increasing divergence between wildlife conservation and natural history. Knowledge of wildlife, or even interest in wildlife, seems to be thought no longer necessary for a professional wildlife conservationist. In 2008 I attended a conference in which 17 graduates of a Countryside Management MA presented their ideas for improvement of Bangor’s green spaces. They covered views of the sites, views from the sites, footpaths, even likely effects on house prices. But when it was pointed out none of them had mentioned wildlife, the answer was that it is a specialist subject which they couldn’t be expected to know about.
As a consequence of this decline in naturalists in conservation jobs, I’ve known golden-rod be cleared from pasture in the belief it was ragwort; I’ve seen a pick-axe being used among frog orchids to hack out cotoneaster from limestone pavement in a National Nature Reserve; we’ve had conservation staff responsible for an SSSI to protect the hornet robberfly not realising that a fly associated with herbivore dung requires its habitat to be grazed; and in 2011, 39 years after Alan Stubbs wrote on the importance to wildlife of dead wood, 22 years after Martin Speight’s recommendations to the Council of Europe on the entomological value of dead wood, and 19 years after Peter Kirby’s book on habitat management, I still see old trees being tidied away along footpaths in conservation woodland instead of footpaths being routed away from old trees.
The challenge for British natural history is not so much to recruit more naturalists, but to persuade the conservation organisations to value naturalists and to include knowledge of wildlife in their recruitment criteria. At present, we suffer from Little Man Syndrome: ”We have this marvellous little man who comes along and tells us all about the bugs. It goes over my head, but the children love it.”
Perhaps the most personal satisfaction in biological recording comes from seeing a species’ distribution map where one of the dots lies 100 miles from the rest, and knowing that is my record. Or else it makes me think I should have had the identification checked.