Birds, Leps, Observations & Generalities - the images and ramblings of Mark Skevington. Sometimes.

Wednesday 11 March 2020

At the Altar

I left work late this afternoon but still with enough daylight to do something. It was dry, but overcast and likely to get duller, mild but very gusty. I ended up at Altar Stones - more by default than design. The route from work to my intended site, Warren Hills, took me past Markfield and I decided to change venue for expediency. Turned out to be a fair twist of fate, as with only around half an hour of actual activity this site was perfect - straight out of the car and into habitat rather than walking for five or ten minutes.


I ended up sieving grassy clumps, which has so far seemed to be far more productive for a range of stuff than sieving leaf litter (unless you are specifically looking for collembola!). I've potted up a few beetles (including a Sitona type weevil with massive bulging eyes) and ground bugs to check, plus a moth caterpillar to rear and check. I took a couple of quick snaps, and noticed something on this one that completely bypassed me whilst looking through the tray in life.

Heads Gone?

I'll work through the dets tomorrow. In the meantime, another beetle from yesterday .....

Keyed to Calathus rotundicollis - look at the claw-teeth on that. A new one for me.

I also printed some labels for the (dodgily) carded specimens. Think I'll have to re-think that one, even the stiffest paper we have at work is not sturdy enough. I'll maybe laminate them.


Think the data label content should be okay though. Top label has collection detail (date, who, site name and grid ref), and bottom label has determination detail (date, who, order|family, species). I used a background colour cos I can; probably completely against some sort of proper science protocol but hey.

The garden moth trap got an outing last night, only the second or third this year: 13 Common Quakers, 1 Clouded Drab, 1 March Moth, 3 Emmelina monodactyla. Thrilling.

6 comments:

Gibster said...

I'm now at the stage whereby I'm about to completely curate my collection, new (far smaller) labels, new longer pins, no colours and standardised card/nu-poly sizes. If I don't do it now (currently several 100 specimens) it'll be a hefty chore later (several 1000 specimens), not something I relish but it simply has to be done.

Gibster said...

For what it's worth, I think a 6-fig griddie is totally adequate. In fact, I routinely use monad (ie 4-fig) griddies unless it's something totally bonkers. Probably a personal thing, but is there any real requirement/need for better than 1ksq references?

martinf said...

When I started I used only one card size so had some ridiculously small beetles on the same sized card as a a large carabid. I now just try and go and small as card as possible. On grid refs I started on 10 fig!! now use 6 as standard, apart for glow worms as the scheme wants as detailed as possible.

Skev said...

Generally I use 6-fig grid ref as more often than not I'm running spaced out traps or recording from around an area, sometimes I try to be more specific but agreed it's not really necessary. I'm going to have to re-print these labels on something thicker anyway; I tried using an even smaller font (4pt instead of 6pt) to check and can get the label smaller with it - just need some decent card to print on. I'm going to get some proper mounting boards for when I have a proper go, these were some spur of the moment efforts on bits of card I already had to try it out.

Does your task mean re-carding everyting Seth!?

Gibster said...

Ha, no mate it certainly does not! I'm changing to a longer pin length and I'm reducing label size throughout, the specimens will stay on their existing cards untouched. Pinned stuff (mostly diptera, hymenoptera and various small orders) will have their nu-poly strips trimmed down to something approaching a set of standard lengths per family. I may blog about this, in fact.

Skev said...

I did wonder! I've got some thin/trimmable plastazote type strips for pinning diptera and bits. And for some reason I've got a huge roll of plastazote; I must have ordered it in error but I've had it so long now I can't for the life of me remember why I've got it. One day I'm sure it will be great for making some home-made storage boxes.