eBird review

There are a number of applications to use to record and log bird and other wildlife sightings out there on the market, both free and paid for.

For birds I usually use Bird Journal (https://www.birdjournal.com/) which exists in a desktop form and as a mobile application which syncs with the desktop version. There is a free version and a paid for version. I use the paid version as it allows me to compare and contrast records from previous months and years which the free version doesn’t allow for. Also Bird Journal doesn’t just allow me to log bird sightings, I can log sightings for other taxa too which is fantastic for my own records.

I am a biological recorder, I want the sightings I see to be useful to someone. So I want to share my records with the relative authorities and organisations. If I can stop or alter a development because of my sighting of a Stock Dove 15 years logged in a database then so much for the better. This is where Bird Journal breaks down, I can, in theory transfer my data across to those who need the data but every time I have tried it lately it has failed or is so long winded it is barely worth doing.

This why I have tried eBird (https://ebird.org/home), a bird logging app and website developed by Cornell University in the US. After a long time I uploaded my records from Bird Journal to eBird and within days I had emails from local recorders and organisers questioning or clarifying my records, some from years ago. I also decided to try the app.

I have used it 3 times in 2 locations so far and I can say it is really good. It uses your phone’s GPS to log your location, which you can then set yourself as a regular patch, or later using the website link your site to an existing ‘hotspot’ which you can then compare your sightings to others who go to the same location. For instance, Jackson’s Brickworks – one of my regular haunts, is a ‘hotspot’ where myself and one other user log sightings. The other site are fields near my house which isn’t a hotspot.

To record your sightings once you have chosen your location you press ‘Start’ and off you go. As soon as you see or hear a bird you can type it in and eBird will find your species on its database, you select it, enter the number of birds or just select the ‘present’ box, and that’s it. You can also make notes or select the bird’s breeding status using a drop down box. So for instance if I see a Coal Tit I begin to write it down, after a few letters it will give me a selection of species to choose from. This in theory should give me the bird I’m looking for; however Coal Tit currently gives me three options: Coal Tit, Coal Tit (British), and Coal Tit (Continental). Two of these options are applicable, plain old Coal Tit and Coal Tit (British). I select the vanilla Coal Tit as ‘British’ is there just to differentiate the British and Continental races, they are the same species however just you can add race detail if you want, more useful if you think you’ve seen a continental race in the UK or vice-versa. This needs to be more obvious I feel to the general user. When you have finished birding you press the ‘review’ button which allows you (obviously) to review your sightings. It’ll ask you if you logged all your sighting or just highlights, it’ll ask how many observers were there, and tell you how many minutes and what distance you have walked; all of which is used to determine recorder effort. When you feel everything is in order press submit and that’s it. The records are then accessible to relevant recorders.

I can’t log other wildlife though. This is a problem for me as I record many types of wildlife; in order to record multiple taxa I have to log out, open another app and log the sightings on that app (I had to do this yesterday to log bird sightings on eBird and butterfly sightings elsewhere). This is not an issue with Bird Journal.

Another potential shortcoming is I’m not entirely sure if my bird data is going to the correct place. In the UK bird records should be sent to the British Trust for Ornithology (BTO)which stores, analyses and makes available all bird data. The BTO , however, has its own logging app and website called BirdTrack (BirdTrack); records on this app go direct to the BTO. I’m not sure if British eBird records eventually end up with the BTO or are stored and kept by Cornell University, which make them less useful in a UK context.

All in all however I will continue to use eBird. It is free to use and for the most part is accessible with data which is instantly comparable to other users’ data. I will keep Bird Journal as a back up and database however. I haven’t as yet used BirdTrack with any great regularity, in the past I have found the app and website clunky to use which has put me off enormously, although I believe they have revamped both in recent months.

 

Review: Collins Butterfly Guide

I thought I’d give reviewing stuff and things another go. My initial thoughts on reviewing items was not to limit myself to brand new stuff that’s just come out, to be honest I can’t afford to buy new books when they come out, and secondly I thought it’d be nice to review older books to see if they stack up now, or they need updating, and just to be different!

Red Admiral. Photo: Author.

A couple of years ago I had a regular task of surveying butterflies at the Dove Stone reserve, I volunteered my time once a week from April to September to regularly walk a set route (or transect) and identify and count all the butterflies I see a set distance away (I talk about this in my 4th ever post in 2013!). This was absolutely brilliant and taught me a lot about both butterflies and survey techniques. So I’ve now got an interest in butterflies.

This week I acquired a copy of the Collins Butterfly Guide: The Most Complete Guide to the Butterflies of Britain and Europe by Tom Tolman and Richard Lewington and published in 2009 (currently priced £15.90 from Amazon UK). This is one of the ‘black’ Collins guides. I now own four of them, this one, the Fungi Guide, the Tree Guide, and the birders’ bible: Bird Guide. They all have one thing in common, they are comprehensive, they don’t shy away from the details. However they all seem to be different in approach.

The Collins Bird Guide and the Fungi guide are pretty accessible, the Bird Guide in particular. The Tree guide is less so, it is pretty confusing, especially when you are trying to find native trees amongst reams and reams of obscure ornamental non-natives which inhabit the book. But it is readable.

Which brings me to my subject, the Collins Butterfly Guide. I’ll give you this description of a common butterfly, the Green-veined White.

“First Brood: ups veins lined greyish; unh yellow, veins suffused greenish: male upf apical black scaling on veins variable, sometimes vestigial; spot in s3 variable, sometimes absent: female ups and uns black markings better developed, with additional spot in s1b and s5 upf.” and it continues..

I’m pretty familiar with some technical language by now but this is a step too far. There is a glossary of abbreviations towards the start of the book and another fuller glossary towards the back to help decipher the text but you need to memorise it pretty well to use the guide efficiently. There are very roughly 1000 species described in this manner, some more briefly than others. It seems to me that the authors have set out to make the guide as incomprehensible to the casual reader as possible. Even fairly basic and common terms have been omitted, for example the familiar butterfly stages that everyone knows including small children: Egg, Caterpillar, Chrysalis, and Adult/Butterfly have been replaced with Ovum, Larva, Pupa, and Imago, which whilst technically correct could prove another barrier to a casual reader.

On top of this overly technical and abbreviation obsessed text comes an assumed knowledge that the reader has an intimate knowledge of botanical scientific names. Let’s go back to the Green-veined White, the guide describes it’s host plants (the plants which the caterpillars feed on) as thus:

“Brassicaceae, including:- Cardamine pratensis; C. amara; C. palustris, Nasturtium officinale, Lepidium heterophyllum; Lunaria rediviva;“ and again it continues..

Of all those Scintific names I only recognise the family name Nasturtium. There is no English plant names mentioned, which is odd as the book is written in English. (Scientific names are universal no matter what language, a Parus major is universal but a Great Tit in English, a Koolmees in Dutch etc.). Maybe I’m displaying my own botanical ignorance but then again I’m trying to read a book marketed to a general readership; I’ve seen this book for sale in various Waterstones branches as well as in my local library.

Now to the good bits. The accompanying drawing of the butterflies are superb as you would expect from Richard Lewington, with all butterlies drawn with wings spread and wings folded up as they would at rest, maybe one minor criticism is there is no illustrations of caterpillars but I suppose space had to be saved somewhere! The depth is astonishing, as I said above there are very roughly 1000 butterflies described and illustrated from throughout Europe, you won’t get all this in any other generalist book.

Overall I wouldn’t recommend the Collins Butterfly Guide however. The language of the text is far too technical and is as a result pretty off putting; I would suggest that future editions tone the technical stuff down a bit! If you were looking for a butterfly guide to British and Irish moths I would recommend the Pocket Guide to Butterflies of Great Britain and Ireland published by British Wildlife Publishing (£9 from Amazon UK), this again has great illustrations by it’s author Richard Lewington but it also has a very readable accompanying text. The various life-cycles such as egg caterpillar and chrysalis are also illustrated too. This book just focuses on butterflies found in the UK and Ireland so you don’t have to sift through 101 different European species of Grayling to get to your potential British butterfly. I could possibly suggest the Collins Guide to anyone touring Europe, it would just about fit nicely into a backpack for instance, it’s definitely not a coffee table book, just swat up on the abbreviations and the glossary beforehand! But if you are going to a specific country I’d probably try and source a country specific guide.

Thanks for reading this far!!

PS: Thanks to HIHO for adding me to their list of great-uk-bloggers on twitter! I’m humbled!

Wading Inspiration

A couple of weeks ago I attended a talk at CAWOS, my local ornithological society (see an earlier post about my take on traditional societies) and my mind was opened, again! The talk was by Rick and Elis Simpson on the subject of wading birds (or shorebirds depending on where you live!).

Now, I’ve attended a few talks in this winter season already, one was about Derbyshire wildlife, another was about Oystercatchers, but I missed one on my specialist subject of upland Pennine wildlife (D’oh!). None of my attended talks, though very well researched and presented particularly inspired me to further action. Until now.

Ringed Plovers, Leasowe, Merseyside. Photo: Alex Cropper

Rick and Elis, to cut a long story short, decided to take a round the world trip to see as many wading birds as possible for charity. This was done initially to raise money for the Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust (WWT) to help the fortunes of the Spoon-billed Sandpiper. The focus soon changed however. They began realising that many species of wader they were seeing were in trouble and were in need of help. Again to cut the story down again they then saw that many organisations and individuals were putting in a lot of effort into reversing population declines by running low-cost conservation programs. For instance, to help protect some beach breeding waders in Australia leaflets were printed out along with some larger posters to create awareness within the beach using public. This cost less than £1000. Other projects include providing farmers with training and the means to work around breeding waders in their crop fields (for instance getting marker flags/poles to mark the nests out to avoid destroying them), and purchasing mist nets to assist local research projects, both projects that wouldn’t cost a lot of money. An idea for a charity was born – Wader Quest. A charity that helps fund small and cheap to run shorebird projects, and raises funds for wader conservation. A wonderful idea, many conservation charities spent tens of thousands of pounds/dollars on gargantuan and intensive research projects and nature reserve running costs; which is fantastic but doesn’t leave much room for the little guy. I joined the charity as a sponsor almost immediately.

A mixed wader flock at Leasowe, Merseyside (Look hard, they’re there believe me!). Photo: Alex Cropper

Now, I have a confession, my knowledge of waders is pretty poor and I prefer birds of prey and seabirds, but don’t tell anyone! But I love the idea of funding grass-roots projects – I firmly believe that if the grass roots are sorted out than the people and organisations further up the ladder will have a lot easier job ahead of them (like in the rest of life). I’d definitely urge everyone to think about joining Wader Quest as a sponsor, they’re fantastic! (And no, I don’t work for them I’m just completely inspired by them!). Now, I’m going to stop writing at start swatting up on wading birds…..

Here’s their website: http://www.waderquest.org/

Common Micro-moths of Berkshire – a review

I’ve decided in 2015 to try and learn a different taxon group. I may even put birds on the back burner (in a non-professional sense) to concentrate on something else. A bit drastic I know but I don’t really want to be a one trick pony (who lets face it can’t always get the trick right!) and would love to broaden my naturalist horizon. Fungi appealed to me towards the end of last year and is a group I’ll take more interest in for sure. How about molluscs? More specifically slugs and snails, it’s niche and I’ve got two excellent books on them but they don’t really get me going if I’m honest. Now I’ve had a moth trap for coming up to five years which I’ve used most weeks in the summer months. Bingo! Moths it is, I’ve got the gear, I’ve some field guides, the local county recorder lives in my town, and the moths can come to you, not the other way around!

My local county recorder is Steve Hind (more specifically, the micro-moth recorder) and I paid him a visit before Christmas. He is a font of knowledge and provided great help, put me in contact with a local forum, and recommended me a load of books and journals. One of which was the ‘Common Micro-moths of Berkshire.’ This is slightly odd as I live in Cheshire, but I was assured only 6 of the moths in the book don’t occur in Cheshire at the moment. I had a quick flick through it and thought it looked great, so a month and £10 later I bought it.

Now micro-moths haven’t had a dedicated field-guide to them for one very good reason, there are literally thousands of them! And most of them don’t have an English name, instead most have scientific two part names. So they haven’t been all that accessible to the budding moth enthusiast (should they be called mothers perhaps? Maybe not.). This was rectified a couple of years ago with the publication of a dedicated field guide by Stirling and Parsons. But still the sheer number of them can be overwhelming; which is where ‘Common Micro-moths of Berkshire’ comes in.

I have to say the book is excellent, it covers 103 species of moth which are the most commonly recorded in Berkshire. There is an easy access thumbnail selection to quickly narrow down a potential moth at the start of the book and then a full page description of each moth, along with hinting at other moths your selection may be similar to. For example one of my favourite micro-moths is Emmelina monodactyla or ‘Common Plume,’ which I think looks like one of these:

Common Plume

Fiesler Storch

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There is a brief description of the habitat of the Common Plume which is stated as a ‘variety of different habitats’ and whose status is ‘Common’ and then gives a detailed description of what it looks like highlighting important features to look out for, hopefully leading to an easy ID. If not than my potential Common Plume could, according to the similar species given, be a Stenopyilia bipunctidactyla or a S. pterodactyla. There is also a handy graph giving the flight seasons (when are you likely to see an adult flying moth?) although this is less helpful in more northern Cheshire than it would be if I lived in Berkshire. The guide does this pretty well for every moth, most of which are far less distinctive than the Common Plume. Because it is limited to common micro-moths which are you are more likely to catch in a light trap or whilst on a walk it doesn’t overwhelm you with hundreds of options to choose from. I definitely think you can use it in conjunction with the comprehensive Stirling and Parsons guide though, especially as not every description gives clues as to whether the moths are attracted to light or sugar, or are day-flying for instance.

The other thing to remark upon is that the production values of the book are superb. The book looks like it could have come from a major publishing house. It hasn’t. It comes from a local enthusiast group, the Berkshire Moth Group. It is incredibly professional looking, well laid out, glossy pages, a good index, and an appendix which goes into more detail with more alternative species similar to ones found in the main body of the book. There are a few errors which are highlighted in an Errata print-out loosely included at the beginning of the book, including a few mislabelled photographs which would unfortunately confuse IDs. But on the whole these shouldn’t distract from this fantastic book which I would recommend to any naturalist.

So I think I’ve got it. Moths it is for the year (OK maybe I can begin to look at slugs and snails too, and perhaps fungi, and maybe lichen. Perhaps also bryophytes, or perhaps beetles, or hoverflies, spiders even? Possibly.)

Book available from http://www.nhbs.com for £9.99.

Both photos from Wikicommons.