Anyone with a birding background will be fully aware of the BUBO Listing website that has been around for many years. Around mid-October, BUBO [essentially Mike Prince and Andy Musgrove] launched a long-held idea to provide a PSL add-on to BUBO, with the potential for 1000s of species to be added across the orders to provide a more managed repository for PSL lists than the existing numbers-only website. This then allows all listers to see what is and isn't on each others lists, with automated queries set-up to see what targets and blockers there are in each group.
The new BUBO hosted PSL site is here: Pan-species Listing by BUBO
Adding everything progressively as orders were released was easy initially, but by the time bryophytes, fungi, slime moulds and lichen were available I was already playing catch-up getting my list on. But it's done now, with lichens and then fungi added this evening. Overall it was quite enlightening as I found a number of duplications and omissions in the process. The old website is still there, but I'll not be using it after finalising the numbers to match BUBO as of today [4010 species].
One of my actual recent ticks is a very bizarre worm that is widespread and may be common, but given it usually lives in the sublittoral up to a 1000m deep beneath the sand/mud it is not usually found unless washed up after storms. I was in Devon for a family wedding, and we had a nice family walk along the beach at Westward Ho! where at least four of these bizarre things were along the tideline. I shuffled one into a shallow pool and saw it was clearly alive. Quite why something living up to such great depths beneath sand should have such dramatic iridescent coloured chaetae is beyond me!
Back in October 1982 I saw Depeche Mode live for the first time. The support act was Matt Fretton, and I remember nothing of him apart from one song that was released early the following year and became a very minor hit. But it was one of those songs you sort of never forget, even if never listening to it. I recently looked for the song on Amazon Music - nothing there. Probably not on any streaming services. Luckily though - as it seems is always the case - someone has stuck it on You Tube. So for the nostalgia here it is .....
