In 1968, as an undergraduate, I saw a notice in the Hancock Museum about the moth recording scheme and at the time was courting a young lady who was really into caterpillars. The dynamism of the entomology lecturer, Edmund Burtt, really inspired me so we borrowed a light trap and had pleasant times. Albert Long of the Hancock Museum assisted with identification and I really had a feeling albeit in a small way I really could contribute to science. A little later, when Tommy Dunn of the local natural history society published some of our records in the Vasculum I was totally hooked, and chose museums as a career where a living could be made from natural history, and have never regretted that.
I have recently submitted my 248,000 database to Biological Records Centre. 10 hours a week for 5 years, seemed like some bit of most evenings, entering data and editing data. The family is sure it was much more! The sponsors have not paid me to say this, but it really is the ‘NBN Gateway’ that has been the inspiration. There will be a published ‘Atlas’ but instead of that being that for the next decades, an up-to date map is always available. No hours spent getting records to and from Local Environmental Records Centres, all done for me via the ‘Gateway’. Currently I am working on verification rules for “NBN Record Cleaner” that I can then use retrospectively to check the data currently on the ‘Gateway so some of the complaints about quality of maps should not apply to caddis.
(Oh incidentally I have also enjoyed catching all those caddis with the family, opening the intriguingly shaped parcels of caddis sent to me, the museums I have visited, and the marvellous field trip accounts in the old literature – why can’t we write them like that these days.) But that is only the start really. I would like to write a “Caddis of …” for every vice county, as a basic list to support a county referee for every LERC. With my colleagues in the riverfly recording schemes grouping, we hope to continually add content to our web pages for every species – with of course up to date ‘Gateway’ maps embedded.
By regarding adult caddis adult as honorary micro-lepidoptera, the light-trappers can get hooked on the group and the increasing move by the Environment Agency into species rather than family level survey adds another suite of quality larval records. Then the matrix is completed by the special expeditions to check on the status of the rare species. Lots of new records, but hopefully no one will have to re-do the historic records that I have entered – of no immediate conservation value, but invaluable for tracking longer-term distribution changes.
As Ian said at the end of his presentation at the NBN Conference, recording freshwater life is always enjoyable!
