Identification

Thursday 15th October 2020

One of the most important skills in wildlife conservation is identification. Yesterday we had two lectures involving identification.

The first was a woodland plant survey - the good news was that most of what we surveyed was ivy - the bad news was we couldnt identify any of the other plants!

The second was a bird survey - both a point and transect survey - I wont go into the details - but safe to say that doing a transect survey will be one of my assessments so I am sure I will share more in future! Yet again our identification skills were poor - luckily we had Suzanne with us who had hidden bird identification skills - otherwise we would have had no clue. I had a fantastic time - so much to learn.

Today we learnt about biological identification and used the iRecord app - the Biological Record Centre app - actually quite easy to use - we all wondered around the university grounds finding things to record - again not as easy as it seems - I found this mushroom - even now after much looking I am not certain what it is - much more to do!

Apps that we did use - BirdNET (Android only but if you can do download it to recognise bird song), Google photos and Seek - not too bad for plants , trees and insects - and the Collins identification book (old fashioned but still good)!

Tomorrow I need to get a move on with our first assignment - its an 8 slide presentation - in my old world I would have written it the morning of the presentation - now I need to do so much more work - I will let you know how it goes.