Biological Recording – An Early Start
I was trained by my parents to record plants and animals, and started keeping a nature notebook at the age of 6. The purpose was to learn the names. Recording was incidental.
Nevertheless, on page 1 there are 3 proper records, from Popples Bridge on the River Yealm (VC 3; SX5954). I can date them only to March 1952. We were staying in a house with no running water; you washed your face in an ewer. It was a very wet day, and my parents must have decided that the youngster needed an occupation. The most interesting find of that holiday was an octopus in a rock pool, later drawn by me from memory with 17 appendages (legs?).
I also collected butterflies and moths. The excitement of eviscerating and stuffing the corpse of a Death’s-head Hawk-moth is still with me. One of my great-grandfathers had a fine collection of butterflies, including two specimens of British Large Copper (he had bought them). He assured me that they were superior to the surviving continental race. I could not see the difference, and was more impressed by his Cleopatra butterflies, also continental.
Botany gradually took over from entomology. In 1952 I was given Summerhayes’s ‘Wild Orchids of Britain’. Orchids were my favourites. I botanized both at home and on holidays, and was shown Erica mackaiana and Radiola linoides in Donegal by the famous Irish Botanist, David Webb. I went to boarding school in 1958. The tone of my notes became more ecological. On 20 May 1959, ‘Over large areas of young woodland, the dominant plants of the ground flora were bluebell (Scilla non-scripta) and yellow archangel (Galeobdolon luteum). They made a closed community and were fairly evenly mixed.’ Latin took over for records in 1960.
At university, I studied mathematics but kept on botanizing. I came under the spell of the bryologist Harold Whitehouse. He led the Cambridge bryological excursions till he died in 2000. Then Chris Preston led them for 10 years. Now, 50 years on, I lead them myself.
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A really exciting moss – the endemic Sphagnum skyense, photographed by Gordon Rothero on Rum in 2004. It is mixed with Breutelia chrysocoma, which although not quite endemic is nearly so.
So what motivates me as a Biological Recorder? In youth I had much encouragement. I collected and identified many things – butterflies, moths, stamps, coins, shells and so forth. Now I specialize in mosses and liverworts. Most of my professional career was spent as a mathematically-oriented plant ecologist. Ecologists put down their quadrats and record the species within them. That too is biological recording. Surely the greatest pleasure is to be out in the field, identifying plants and seeking to understand the factors that control them.
Mark Hill