Rules and regulations

I guess most of us who are into wildlife keep lists. It's only natural to put names to things and then to keep a record of what you've seen. For some it will just be in their heads for others it will be in notebooks and on comprehensive spreadsheets.

My first list was as a seven or eight year old when I put a tick next to every bird I had seen in my copy of Bertel Bruun's Birds of Britain and Europe and I had a tally in pencil at the back which totted the number up.

For years my most sacred of lists was my excel spreadsheet tallying my world list of birds. It was the only one I cared about, and I updated it religiously after each trip away. With the cessation of flying for fun this has pretty much fallen by the wayside and I haven't had a world bird lifer for about five years. The last being a couple of ticks whilst on a work trip to Canada.

My listing emphasis is now pretty much UK focused and I have a vague sense of all the species I have seen here. Some taxa lists are better informed than others and my plant list is definitely a 'work in progress' as I comb old notebook as well as my patchy memories. 

The one that I'm particularly diligent in maintaining is (unsurprisingly) my beetle list. It seems a simple enough task to make a note of every beetle that you see, but it's not necessarily quite as simple as that, for what actually constitutes a 'tick'.

When carrying out a bit of beetling there are a number of ways one can proceed. Direct searching, sweeping, beating, sieving all yield live beetles to be added to the record. But there are other methods such as pit falls or vane traps that can (depending on the methodology) give you lots of dead specimens suspended in preserving liquid. These methods are great for generating biological records especially of species that may be hard to find through other means. They help give a fuller picture of what is actually out there, but can they constitute a tick on your list?

As an example, I could go out tonight and put some baited kill traps down and catch me a Cambridgeshire polecat (I wouldn't really, I'm just making a point 😉). They are here, as I occasionally see good examples as road kill. But could I count it? It would stand as a valid biological record but I don't think I'd count it on my list. Just wouldn't seem right. 

Would you count a dead beached whale that had originally been alive when first washed up? If so how decomposed would it have to get before you didn't count it? What about the skeleton? You take my point. 

So is it the same for beetles. Well apparently not. There seems to be quite diverse thought over what you can and can't count. For some people, trapped dead beetles are tickable. For others, only if they are caught in a trap set by the person doing the ticking. There are also those who only count live beetles, the dead ones providing records not ticks for the list. 

I must stress that there's no right or wrong to this , just differences of opinion. No one's judging...much.

I'm a live beetles only kind of guy as far as listing goes but I do occasionally use trapping methods that generate dead specimens. This has meant that up until now I've had two lists. The main one. The one of all the beetle species I've seen alive. Plus a second one. The one of beetles I've only seen dead.

Over the last couple of years the former has been increasing nicely whilst the latter has been massively reduced, until last week only one species remained on my 'only seen dead list'. Pretty good going I reckon as I'm fast approaching 700 species on the main list.

Last week, I had my annual winter fuel delivery and was left with a massive pile of logs sat on my lawn. Luckily it was warm and dry as it took me a couple of days to stack and store them.

In the sun the logs gave off a distinctive smell and within a short time I noticed beetles turning up and landing on the logs. Looking at a couple down the microscope I was rather pleased to find that I no longer had a list of beetles I have only seen dead.... 😀

Hylesinus varius