Mostly I had been too busy working at Selwyn's Wood with the team, but I recently gave up the work after something like 15 years. So I can now have a coffee with the team, do a little gentle work (or not as the mood takes me) and, of course, criticise!
As I wandered round, there were so many occasions when a tree or a turning in the path held a memory. My first sight of a dormouse; a glow-worm; a special cricket in the nearby marsh; young green woodpeckers just leaving their nest and recently spying a white admiral butterfly which are few and far between these days.
A new experience has been moth trapping. Unfortunately, in spite of the mild, windless September evening, I wasn’t impressed. I had visions of finding some lovely big hawk moths, or at least "tigers", but what did we find: a number of micro moths – very small as their name suggests, not very colourful, and, to my mind, not worth all the trouble of erecting lights, boxes and a generator.
But our expert was not worried. "Oh. Look that's an acleris literana - or is it an emergens?" Actually it was the latter, and that is the difference between the enthusiastic one-specialist naturalist and others who may know merely that the little brownish moth is a micro sort. Or put it another way: the others know a little about a lot, while the one-specialist knows a lot about very little. Funnily enough, the find of the evening was not a moth but a beetle - a minotaur - a male with three horns, it is black, and it buries rabbit droppings and sheep dung on which the adults and larvae feed. I had to look at the book to know the full details of it's disgusting habits, which must make me one those who know a very little about a lot.
While I know little about moths, I enjoy the names somebody gave them years and years ago. Just listen: Clouded Magpie, Scorched Wing, Great Oak Beauty; Buff Arches, Old Lady, Red-necked footman, and hundreds more.
It is the sheer mixture of the different naturalists it seems to me that has kept the balance of what we are pleased to call variously, eco-systems, biodiversity or just the balance of nature.
John Hall © 2010