Growing up near Thorne Moors, Britain’s largest lowland raised mire, I began birding at age 11, in the early 1970s. Winter birding was sparse, so I got into lichens and insects by 14, encouraged by excellent natural history societies in Goole and Doncaster. Given a copy of Clapham, Tutin and Warburg’s Flora for my sixteenth birthday, I was impressed to find keys to (what at the time seemed like) all the British flora: suddenly I was addicted to keys. I was soon recording and writing about the flora, lichens and fungi of Hatfield Moors with school-friend, Mark Lynes (author of the 2022 BSBI Alchemilla handbook).
Going to Durham University to study zoology in 1979 coincided with Kerney & Cameron’s slugs and snails field guide, and I dived in deep. In my first week in Durham, I re-found Arion flagellus at its original British locality, 200m from my room. Within a year I’d produced local keys to slugs, and was soon an author of the first AIDGAP slug key. I bought a microscope with the left-overs of my first term’s grant (ah, happy days) and was soon collecting Royal Ent. Soc. Handbooks, and learning carabids, ants, Auchenorhyncha and Heteroptera. Back in Yorkshire, the outstanding team of naturalists at Doncaster Museum, headed by the late Peter Skidmore, could check almost any species identification: Summer vacations were invertebrate surveys of Thorne and Hatfield Moors.
A year at the then Nature Conservancy Council’s Invertebrate Site Register in London brought me in contact with southern entomologists and sites, living a tube stop from Epping Forest. I Moved to the Biological Records Centre at Monks Wood, Cambridgeshire, in 1983, with responsibility for invertebrate recording. In fourteen years there, I met a very wide range of invertebrate specialists, and my interests grew steadily. Overlapping with Mark Telfer at Monks Wood, we began working Breckland for carabids and other invertebrates, finding Wormwood Moonshiner Amara fusca and much else.
In 1997, I left Monks Wood for the local Wildlife Trust, as conservation director, and I’m still there (now chief executive). This Trust runs 30 or so wildlife training workshops each year: I’ve run about 250, and as a result I’ve written local keys for a wide range of groups, including ants, beetles, Orthoptera, slugs, land snails and pondsnails, Cladonia lichens, willows, ferns, umbellifers… almost anything I’ve been asked to teach. Many of the keys are downloadable from Wildlife Guides and ID Keys | Wildlife Trust for Beds Cambs & Northants
My pan-species recording slowed down with the appearance of the last volume of Sell & Murrell’s Flora in 2018, including 62 controversial new elm (Ulmus) microspecies. I now have a herbarium of about 6000 elm specimens, tens of thousands of photographs, new keys wildlifebcn.org/sites/default/files/2025-09/Complete key to native and naturalised elms v. 4.0 July 2025.pdf and an extra dozen or so ‘species’ (DNA work is gradually sorting out the parentage of the many hybrids). But writing a monograph on one complex small group doesn’t boost your species lists very much.
In the last couple of years I’ve rediscovered microscopy, and I’m increasingly getting into testate amoebae, rotifers, and other microscopic groups.
