30 Days Wild Day 2- Moths

I started off the day with breakfast outside- I'm heading back to York today for my final exam on Saturday, so I wanted to make the most of some fresh air while I could. 

The garden was full of bees, but the things which really caught my eye were some beautiful moths on the catmint (Nepeta sp.). It's one of the best plants for pollinators in the garden, always covered in bees, but there were some moths I don't remember seeing before joining them today. Using Butterfly Conservation's moth identification tool, I found that they were mint moths (Pyrausta aurata). They were tiny but beautiful, with vivid, almost purple forewings and gold spots.  

It was so lovely in an otherwise hectic day to take a moment to stop to enjoy watching nature which could so easily be missed in a rush. I would probably not have noticed these moths if I'd just been walking past in a hurry. Now I've seen them, I'll be keeping an eye out for them in the future. 

30 Days Wild day 27- Tree ID

Today I decided to continue my quest to improve my identification skills. This time, I thought I'd make the most of my smartphone and try out some of the many apps available for identifying trees. There are so many to choose from, and they are fantastic tools both to speed up identification and to begin to teach yourself. What's even better is that so many of them (and all the ones I tried) are free. 

The first one I tried out was Leafsnap. It's an incredibly clever idea; you take a photo of a leaf, upload it (you need an internet connection to do this) and the app suggests which trees the leaf could have come from! From the half an hour I spent playing, it seemed to work well. However, it did struggle some of the time, especially with the pinnate leaves of elder, mistaking them for an oak.

While it isn't always accurate and is internet dependent, it's an incredibly fun tool and one I'll definitely keep using!

Next, I downloaded the Woodland Trust British Trees app. It's basically an electronic version of an identification key, narrowing down the number of possible trees as you go through a series of questions. I particularly like the way it can use flowers, fruit, bark, twigs and buds, as well as leaves, for identification. It means that you can still use it if the tree isn't in leaf, and you can more easily differentiate trees with superficially similar leaves. Also, doesn't require an internet connection, so you can use it no matter how far from internet you are!

I found this a really useful and functional app- definitely one I'll be using in the future! That being said, I enjoyed leafsnap too, and it includes a few ornamental species, so I think I'll be keeping them both! If you've tried one of these, or any other good ID apps, I'd love to hear from you in the comments.

20 Days Wild day 26- bird identification

One of my aims at the start of this year's 30 Days Wild was to improve my identification skills. After yesterday's 'spot the raptor' I decided that birds of prey would be a good place to start. So, I sat down with my bird book and went over silhouettes. I think it's one of the best ways to identify birds in flight; it doesn't matter if the light means you can't make out colours or patterns, because if a kestrel shaped bird is hovering, you know it's a kestrel.

Kestrels are probably the easy example, all aerodynamic grace as they hover in the wind. Others I find a bit more tricky. But I think it will be worth it. Just flicking through the book confirmed that the fast, short winged, long tailed bird with an indefinable air of not-a-pigeon I saw while walking back from my boyfriend's graduation was almost certainly a sparrowhawk.

For me, that's one of the holy grails of bird identification skills, alongside knowing bird calls. To be able to identify a bird seen in the distance or in a brief darting flash. Not just by the markings or the colour, but because something in the shape of it, in the way it moves, is indefinably it. I don't know if I'll ever get to that stage (and right now, I'm still very much a birder in training). But it's definitely something to aim for!

The bird book I used for this was the Collins Bird Guide (2^nd edition) by Lars Svensson. It's a great book, but not the cheapest (I got my copy as a present). However, lots of other bird books also have silhouette guides, so if this is something you're looking for, there should be something available for every budget!

30 Days Wild day 25- Deep breath

We made our way back from Cambridge, which meant more motorway birding. Today we had a buzzard on a streetlamp, two hunting kestrels and a game of 'spot the raptor.' I managed to miss a bird of prey flying overhead at Peterborough services, which lead to a fun ten minutes of my boyfriend listing identifying features and me searching google images for possible answers. In the end we worked out it was almost certainly a red kite. Comparison to google images turned out to be a good identification tool, and it was surprisingly entertaining- at least it took our minds off politics!

We had another thunderstorm this evening. It had been muggy all day, and afterwards, the air felt fresh and cool and new.

The news and the internet were full of yet more coverage of the referendum. On Friday there were so many other things happening, but this evening it seemed to be all there was. I needed to just get outside. To feel the damp concrete of the slabs under my bare feet and breathe in the cool air and the smell of gardens after rain. To watch the dusk insects come out and hear the last birds of the evening singing. There's a peace to spending time outside, and it can calm and sooth me when not much else will. I needed that today.

30 Days Wild day 21- Ichneumon wasp

It's the time of year that open doors and windows mean we seem to be constantly rescuing insects from the house. Hoverflies and bumblebees are the most common, but the 21st saw a slightly more unusual insect needing rescuing.

I could see from the narrow waist between the thorax and abdomen that it was one of the Apocrita (a taxa within the Hymenoptera). My guess was some sort of parasitic wasp, but trying to identify it properly was a challenge. Insect taxonomy is an impenetrable tangle, not least because of the sheer number of species there are. Using a combination of books and several websites, I decided that it was probably an ichneumon wasp- a family of parasitic wasps, many of which attack caterpillars. But I couldn't get a firm identification to the species level- there are over 3,000 species in the UK alone! If anyone has any ideas, I'd love to hear from you in the comments.

30 Days Wild day 8- Wildflower identification

Wildflowers are one of many things which I know far less about than I'd like to. So, I decided that for today's #30DaysWild I would take inspiration from the 30 Days Wild website and app, and try to identify a wildflower species which I've been wondering about for weeks.

The walk between my house and university takes me past a shady area full of hawthornes and crab apple trees, and since mid spring it has been full of what I classed, in a vague sort of way, as 'something a bit like honesty (Lunaria annua).' 

I didn't really pay it much attention until it started flowering, when it became apparent it wasn't honesty at all. The flowers were far smaller, and left long seed heads, more like oil seed rape than the distinctive round disks of honesty. So I took some photos of the plants as I walked past them on my way back from university for a more thorough investigation.

The Botanical Society of Britain & Ireland has some fantastic online resources, including a brilliant identification key which I used for this. There are a series of questions on everything from where a plant was seen to if its leaves have stalks (or petioles) joining them to the stem. It them brings up a list of possible results, starting with the most common.

It turns out my mystery wildflower is Alliaria petiolata, also known as garlic mustard. 

  I really love the fact that so many resources like this are available online. While I'll always love bird books and old fashioned identification keys, tools like this make finding out about the natural world so accessible. At a time when there are serious problems engaging children with nature, that has to be a good thing.