Garden Lockdown Birdrace and Bioblitz
On Saturday 16th May 2020 I was invited by Barry Madden and Darren Archer to take part in the Lockdown Garden Birdrace with the suggestion that I make it a garden bio-blitz to encompass my interest in invertebrates. At this time of year, a fair number of people around the country normally take part in a bird race, attempting to see as many species of bird within a day, often raising money for charity in the process. Usually it is done in competing teams. I have enjoyed the odd bird race or two in the dim and distant past (the 1990s), accompanying friends who have cars. It’s not the easiest thing to take part in when your only transport is a bicycle and you’re in the centre of a city.
Lockdown Garden Bioblitz
With coronovirus lockdown this year’s bird race was confined to individuals’ gardens. The weather on Saturday wasn’t particularly promising for invertebrates with cloud and cool wind forecast for Norwich. Nevertheless, I set up the moth trap on Friday night with little prospect of finding much the next morning. How right I was, with only four species in amongst the egg boxes although they did include the second Brindled Beauty we’ve ever seen.
The brief spell of sunshine in the morning was tempered by that chilly NE wind and not a single butterfly put in an appearance. I lucked out in my search of Garlic Mustard plants but Jeremy managed to find what I was seeking – a tiny Orange-tip caterpillar. Bees were woefully low in number with only four species of bumblebee, three solitaries and the expected honeybees. On a sunny day in May I would expect nearer twenty species of bee in the garden.
At this point it would have been tempting to give in and go indoors and have a cuppa and put my feet up. This is where being a generalist comes in useful but even the flies were seemingly having a day off! I struggled to get very many hoverflies, species that generally don’t like really warm weather but they were all off skulking somewhere. (I did peer under foliage for them but our garden has an awful lot of leaves to turn over!) There were noticeably fewer flies in general and they have the added problem of not being easily identified from photographs.
I should point out that I identify invertebrates either from photographs or from live specimens that I catch and then release after keying them out. I don’t generally go in for tray-beating or sweep-netting (I don’t think Jeremy would tolerate damage to his plants if I tried it in the garden!) and I don’t use pan or Malaise traps, preferring to let my catch go.
I do resort to rummaging through leaf litter and turning over logs, stones and flower pots (always replacing things carefully) and in this way was able to add the ‘Famous Five’ common species of woodlice to the bio-blitz list for the day. I also got a ‘plus one’ in the form of Ant Woodlouse. This species is probably my favourite woodlouse. They are small, white and blind and live almost exclusively with Lasius species of ants. I have recorded them in the garden before but only twice, so I was very pleased to find them in two different locations.
Bugs, as in members of the order Hemiptera, are usually very well represented in our garden but the cold weather gave them a very poor showing, and I was reduced to adding ‘cuckoo-spit’ and aphids onto the species’ list! Well, everything counts. In a brief burst of sunshine, I optimistically searched around some plants in a newly created raised bed where I had previously found an unusual ground bug (Raglius alboaccuminata). I had no luck with the bug but instead found a beetle – Scymnus frontalis, one of the inconspicuous ladybirds and a new species for the garden!
Spiders are the things of last resort for many people. This is because of a perceived difficulty in identifying them (yes, they are challenging but become easier the more you look at them – well, some do!) and also because many people are a little bit ‘phobic’ about them. I’ve always been a bit wary of spiders but once I started taking a closer look at them my fascination overcame my apprehension although I’m still not fond of handling anything bigger than a five pence piece (new ones that is, not the old shillings for those who remember them!). I have to admit that I do tend to resort to spiders when all else has hidden up or hibernated though. Luckily, I know where most of the spiders ‘hang out’ in my garden so I was able to locate and even identify them.
In the quest for woodlice I added a new species of centipede to the garden, Stigmatogaster subterranea and also a new snail, Discus rotundatus. I’m not especially fond of slugs, or worms for that matter, so I’m afraid I copped out of rummaging in the compost bins. More spiders and Myriapods could have been discovered if I’d taken the woodpile apart but I found two Tanbark Borer longhorn beetles under the first bit of wood I picked up and didn’t want to risk squashing them so stopped rummaging!
All in all it was an enjoyable day, with five new species added to our ever-growing garden list. I even managed to identify one of the pesky Pardosa spiders (albeit from a dead one I found). It would have been so much better if the weather had been warmer and sunnier though – Sunday morning was warm and sunny and in just half an hour I recorded well over a dozen species that had not been seen on the Saturday!
Winners and losers
Butterflies were noticeable by their absence (adding moths and caterpillars the Lepidoptera came in at 15) and true bugs were well short of their usual abundance with a paltry 6. Beetles fared better on 12 but the bees barely got out of bed with 8! The combined might of flies and hoverflies (Diptera) came to 21, just piping the Arachnids on 20. Woodlice probably won the day with 6 out of the 7 species for the garden recorded.
