Wild Fell: Fighting for nature on a Lake District hill farm
by Lee Schofield (Penguin/Doubleday, 2022)

I thought you might be interested to read the following book which gives an insight into the natural history of the area where I now live.

Lee is my son-in-law’s colleague and they both work at the RSPB’s Haweswater Reserve. Lee came to their wedding a couple of years ago and played the guitar and sang wonderfully which was a great treat. He is a humble modest man but very likeable and extremely knowledgeable about the wildlife of the Lake District.  His book is brave, poignant and ultimately hopeful.

I grew up visiting the Lake District regularly for holidays but over the years the pressures on this beautiful place have increased exponentially. Overgrazing of the fells, pollution of the lakes and also the huge numbers of tourists who visit every year have resulted in a degraded landscape with very little wildlife.

This book is an appeal and a justification for change by a man who really knows his subject. He has been working with others to trial and refine ways to run a viable upland farm in a manner that enriches the landscape in Haweswater and allows nature to creep back slowly but surely. He describes how by planting trees, re-wetting peat bogs and re-wiggling rivers they are slowly making progress. It is understandably not easy for other land managers such as farmers who have lived in the area for generations to accept these changes as a necessary movement towards a healthier more sustainable and ultimately more productive landscape. But Lee looks into the pressures they have faced and the confusing and changing political landscape they have had to contend with and is always broad minded in his writing.

This book has a serious message but is also a fascinating and enjoyable read about the wildlife to be found and the characters who work in this corner of the Lake District. I thoroughly enjoyed reading it, and alongside James Rebanks’ two books A Shepherd’s Life and English Pastoral, I think you get a very balanced view of the pressures and challenges of farming in this beautiful corner of our country as well as a lot of background as to how we have got ourselves into our present nature-depleted state.

Julie Lane
November 2022

Architect’s impression of how the HS2 rail tunnel will be integrated with the Colne Valley Western Slopes. (Photograph: Courtesy of Grimshaw Architects)

The Guardian reports (in an article by Patrick Barkham) on the plan announced this week to rewild 127 hectares around its 10-mile tunnel through the Chilterns:

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2021/mar/03/hs2-to-rewild-127-hectares-around-its-10-mile-chilterns-tunnel”

The area is to be seeded with 70 grass and flower species and planted with native trees to create wood pasture,

Stalk-eyed fly

Dr Erica McAlister, of London’s Natural History Museum, talks to Jim Al-Khalili about the beautiful world of flies and the 2.5 million specimens for which she is jointly responsible.

According to Erica, a world without flies would be full of faeces and dead bodies. Unlike, for example, butterflies and moths, whose caterpillars spend their time devouring our crops and plants, fly larvae tend to help rid the world of waste materials and then, as adults, perform essential work as pollinators. Yet they are rather unloved by humans who tend to regard them as pests at best and disease vectors at worst.

2019 is international Year of the Fly, and dipterists and entomologists around the world are working to raise the profile of the many thousands of species so far known to science.

Erica tells Jim about her work in the museum, cataloguing and identifying new species either sent in from other researchers or discovered by her and her colleagues on swashbuckling trips around the world. Modern gene sequencing techniques are revealing new chapters in the life histories of species, and her collection of 300 year old dead flies continues to expand our knowledge of how the world works.

Perhaps in the future, she argues, we will all be eating pasta and bread made from fly-larvae protein, or using small tea-bag like packets of maggots in our wounds to clean out gangrenous infection.

Click here to listen to the 30 minute interview: The Life Scientific – Erica McAlister on the beauty of flies – BBC Sounds

Tree Bumblebee by Harry Appleyard, Tattenhoe 24 February 2017

Welcome to Bucks Buzzing, and your chance to help the insect pollinators that help all of us.

Pollinators come in a range of shapes and sizes from bumblebees to butterflies, moths, hoverflies, and of course, honey bees.

We depend on pollinators for much of our food including apples, pears, strawberries, plums, peas, beans, and for other important plants like wildflowers.

But our pollinators are falling in numbers and are in severe decline across Buckinghamshire and nationally.

You can help!

Click here for more information.

For Northamptonshire’s butterflies 2018 has been a memorable year for many reasons. Not only did we have two national projects in the county but it was also an exceptional season for many of our butterflies. When I first became interested in the serious study of butterflies I’d often hear stories of huge groundings of Purple Hairstreaks, explosive Black Hairstreak years and numerous rare aberrations and colour forms which at the time such spectacles seemed to be confined to the history books so to witness many of these events first hand in 2018 made the year an extraordinary one to say the least.

Click here to read the rest of the article.

Rivers map

This map will help you find out about your local river and the condition it’s in.

Source: UK Rivers Map | WWF

Harvestman, Leibunum rotundum ©Peter Hassett, Floodplain Forest NR , 21 August 2017

There are some 30 different species of harvestmen (Opiliones) in the UK. This interactive guide is a resource for anyone who wants to identify a harvestman and/or learn about the features that can be used to separate the different taxa in the field.

Click on the link for more information: Harvestmen of Britain and Ireland

Draft interactive ID guide for Silphidae Carrion Beetle

A new draft interactive ID guide for Silphidae (Silphidae is a family of beetles that are known commonly as large carrion beetles, carrion beetles or burying beetles) is available for download: goo.gl/FMVZ3i

The Field Studies Council has compiled a catalogue of over 630 biological identification resources

Click on the link for more information: | Tomorrow’s Biodiversity

Red-Tailed Bumblebee by Harry Appleyard, Tattenhoe 11 April 2016

Welcome to the BRITISH BEES ON FLICKR site. This collection covers nearly all 278 species of bee on the British and Irish list (including the Channel Islands) acting as a virtual field experience and virtual museum collection. Special thanks are due to the Natural History Museum, London and the Oxford University Museum for allowing me to photograph specimens that were lacking in my own collection and to other photographers for allowing me to host their images.

Click here to view the guide.

Red-necked Grebe by Peter Hassett, Draycote Water 1 March 2017

You may be interested in this free app, available for Apple and Android devices:

Smartphones are becoming an increasingly important part of birding. If you want to be the first person to hear about a rare bird, digiscope a rarity, or submitting your sightings, having a small portable computer at your fingertips is enabling all of this to happen. We also look to our smartphones as identification aids now that field guides are packaged into apps. But what if your app could instantly scan your photo and match it to a species based on an archive of millions of bird images? It can.

The Merlin Bird ID app was developed by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology to do just this, taking a photo you snap in the field, and suggesting an identification. Photo ID identifies birds in photos using computer vision technology trained on nearly 3 million images uploaded to Macaulay Library through eBird checklists.

The high accuracy of the Photo ID tool is largely thanks to the extensive collection of images at Macaulay Library, showing birds from many different angles. Annotations on these images (a box drawn around each bird in the photo) also help teach the Photo ID tool to find the birds in the photo–-anyone can help improve Merlin’s accuracy by adding new annotations with Macaulay’s MerlinVision tool.

Click on the link for more information: Blog – Merlin Bird ID app – SWAROVSKI OPTIK

The Vegetative Key to the British Flora

The Vegetative Key to the British Flora: A new approach to naming British vascular plants based on vegetative characters is today available free of charge for people who own a kIndle or use the Kindle app.

Click here for more information.

Volucella zonaria Hoverfly ©Julie Lane. Johnson’s Field, Olney. 25 July 2017

Our co-chairman Julie Lane recently reported seeing the hoverfly Volucella zonaria in her garden in Olney. Julie describes Volucella zonaria as

Very beautiful and hornet like! It’s larvae lives in wasps nests scavenging on detritus.

This guide will help you identify other Volucella hoverflies

Here are 12 longhorn beetles to look out for when they are searching for places to meet partners and lay their eggs.

Source: How to identify longhorn beetles | Discover Wildlife

Ladybirds are instantly recognisable, but what about their larvae? BBC Gardeners’ World Magazine helps you identify these useful garden predators.

Source: Garden Wildlife Identifier: Ladybird Larvae

Explore the Ecological Status of Great Britain’s 10km squares.

Ecological Status is a biodiversity index developed by the Biological Records Centre from national plant and animal observations. It is calculated for each 10km square of Great Britain and is relative to the Environmental Zone that that square occurs in. An Environmental Zone is a region of broadly similar environmental characteristics and is used here to control for non-biological factors that affect biodiversity (e.g. geology and climate).

Click here to explore the map.

Soldier Beetle by Peter Hassett at Grangelands NR. 23May15

Mark Gurney has produced a guide to Soldier Beetles

Click on the link to download the guide.

This important historical parkland of Greenwich Park, much of it on steep slopes giving stunning views across the Thames estuary (in good weather), is also the setting for an array of veteran trees. We will survey their ecology and importance as a habitat and look at the development of the parkland within its landscape.

Source: Veteran Tree Survey and Ecological History – 66160 – FSC

A total of 885 British leaf, stem, twig, bark and samara miners are included in this account. A total of 1, 100 insects are discussed, although not all are miners as all agromyzids recorded in Britain and Ireland whether miner or not are included.

Click on the link to view the website: The leaf and stem mines of British flies and other insects – includes illustrated keys by host genus

Errors in botanical surveying are a common problem. The presence of a species is easily overlooked, leading to false-absences; while misidentifications and other mistakes lead to false-positive observations. While it is common knowledge that these errors occur, there are few data that can be used to quantify and describe these errors.

Click on the link to read the rest of the article: Characterisation of false-positive observations in botanical surveys [PeerJ]

Red-tailed Bumblebee by Harry Appleyard, Howe Park Wood 14 March 2017

WIld About Gardens have produced a Bee Identification chart for some of the more common bees that you may encounter.

Click on this link to download the guide.

Beginner’s guide to identifying British ichneumonids

What are ichneumonids?

Ichneumonids are wasps (order Hymenoptera, superfamily Ichneumonoidea) with a very narrow wasp waist between the middle (mesosoma, roughly equivalent to the thorax on other insects) and hind (metasoma, roughly equivalent to the abdomen on other insects) body parts. They have powerful chewing mandibles, two pairs of usually transparent membranous wings with complex venation and long antennae with 18 or more segments. They are invertebrates, so don’t have a backbone.

You can download the guide here.

It was designed as an impregnable deep-freeze to protect the world’s most precious seeds from any global disaster and ensure humanity’s food supply forever. But the Global Seed Vault, buried in a mountain deep inside the Arctic circle, has been breached after global warming produced extraordinary temperatures over the winter, sending meltwater gushing into the entrance tunnel.

Click on the link to read the rest of the article: Arctic stronghold of world’s seeds flooded after permafrost melts | Environment | The Guardian

Male Orange Tip Butterfly by Harry Appleyard, Howe Park Wood 3 April 2017

Do you have difficulty telling the difference between those white butterflies? This handy guide by Butterfly Conservation will help.

Natural England and the Centre for Ecology & Hydrology (CEH) have launched a new online database and analytical tool called Pantheon, which helps us better understand conservation status and habitat-related traits of invertebrates.

Click on the link for more information: Online analytical tool launched to aid invertebrate conservation – GOV.UK

Robin by Peter Hassett, College Lake 29 December 2016

Learn the most familiar of our birdsong from the comfort of your garden and enrich your experience of that morning cuppa. Encourage more birds by planting trees and expand your knowledge of the soundscape.

Source: Bird song identifier: common garden bird songs – Woodland Trust