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TWIC Recorders’ Forum September 2010
In early September 2010 a group of TWIC recorders and staff got together at Vogrie Country Park to enjoy a day of presentations, ID workshops and barbeque. In the morning session we had an interesting range of talks, introduced by TWIC Chairman Alastair Sommerville. The first talk of the morning was by Gordon Corbett about recording that he had been doing on Dumbarnie Links SWT Wildlife Reserve in Fife since 1997. To date he has recorded a total of 1674 species – focusing mainly on the insects, of which he has recorded 1019 species! Richard Buckland of Butterfly Conservation then talked about the importance of butterfly monitoring and conservation, and which surveys recorders could take part in and how the data was being used. Then TWIC director and botanist Colin Legg, talked about the challenges he faced when learning to identify hoverflies as a non-entomologist. Finally Adrian Sumner, who ran the TWIC recording excursions in 2010, gave a summary of the main findings from the excursions, and reported on some of the more unusual finds that had been made.
After lunch we organised ourselves into groups to go and search for hoverflies, butterflies, bees, and snails and slugs in the grounds of Vogrie House. It was a glorious day and there were lots of interesting findings, some of the more difficult to identify species were brought back into the house in order to use microscopes and identification books to find out what they were.
After the days hard work, with the sun still shining, we enjoyed a barbeque put on by TWIC to say thank you to all our recorders for all their hard work throughout 2010.
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