Working at Home

It's great that the weather has turned back to "normal" - even if that is sunny one moment and dark as twilight the next with random showers that just happen to break as you dash to the shops. So the indoor work continues: just with rather more of an eye at the window and the prospect of "going out botanising".

Steph and I did do a recce last week for a Mammal day in Hay next week. I learnt a lot about mammal tracks and also reminded myself that Hay Common would be a good area to record later in the year. (The mammal day is on the 26th - as I write there are still places; booking essential. See this link.)

Hawthorn, Draenen wen at Hay Common in 2008

Hay Common is near Hay on the path to Rook Wood and has a wide variety of mature trees - presumably with amenity use in the past - together with grazed common land packed with anthills and the interesting Login Brook flowing through it.

The home work has moved on from the Rare Plant Register to the master plan for target sites for BSBI Atlas recording in the next six years. The RPR isn't done but it is now in the form of a long printout to go through in the evenings and weed out the "may be rare but who cares" species (I mean unimportant aliens and subspecies that just aren't normally recorded and are therefore not actually rare etc.)

Looking for target monads to survey is interesting - it turns out that most hectads in Brecknockshire have a good number of records - even the more remote ones. But when the data is narrowed down to obvious recording sessions - many records on the same day in an area - then the holes in the data from the Atlas point of view are revealed and I am poring over GetAMap choosing target monads "sort of at random" but with an eye on accessibility. The order of hectads in my spreadsheet means I have started at the west of the county - a lot of longish walks have to be planned there - very few roads...