Insect recording - March Brown

[Malcolm]

I meant to put this up last week but it slipped my mind.

There is a survey of March Browns being undertaken by the ephemeroptera recording group. If any of you see these then you can record it here.
http://www.brc.ac.uk/mayfly/recording.php

I got an email from Craig MacAdam saying that he would like a photograph to accompany the entry to substantiate the record as there are a couple of other upwings with which it could conceivably be confused. Note that all the upwings can be recorded on this form but the March Brown is the one subject to the special survey.
   

[whinging pom]

Good on you Malcolm.
Have you seen Craigs new book; A Pictorial Guide to British Ephemeroptera. by Macadam and Bennet (FSC guides)? Its the best and easiest indentification guide to the Adults and Nymphs of all the British Up wings i have seen. With distribution maps and occurence tables. Brilliant photos, i can imagine it would be great not just for us with an interest in the entomolgy side, but a good bench side reference for people developing fly patterns based on specific creatures. Essential stuff.
A shameless plug i know, ( though I have no vested interest) but someone needs to spread the word about it. ?15 a pop...Bargain!
http://www.riverflies.org/index/publications

[Malcolm]

No I haven't got that one - I may put it on my birthday list but I already have several books on identification and general entymology.

I've made up my own key card for the most common upwings and in the process of doing so can identify the more common ones quite quickly now. A high proportion of the 38 species we get up here can be reasonably represented with very light olive and mid dark olive bodied dries tied on hooks between 14 and 18.

By the way the NBN distribution charts for a lot of the upwings and other species are truly rubbish - they are so sparse as to be unbelievable. The members of this forum could put together something a lot more impressive. I think they have 4 records of the March Brown - and neither the Tay or the Clyde are included. I've checked a few other areas that I'm interested in and it really is quite poor. They need to get their act together and act as a true centralised species database with proper feeds set up from the hundreds of species interest groups. At the moment they seem to be quite haphazard in what they collect.

[whinging pom]

I should make the effort to do a set of keys, It would save a lot of time in the long run I am sure from constantly cross referencing various books and wishing the info would just stick in my grey matter.

The only time I have come across The NBN distribution charts was when a Stone fly nymph turned up in a kick sample ( still the only one we have seen). There was no record in the 4 ten km squares around us  I dint know if that's now rectified or not. Or wether one lone sighting counts as an occurance.
I guess these things are only as good as the data that's put in. If not many people are contributing to the recording schemes by sending in sightings and samples, the quality and reliability of the information available suffers. We can all, with very little effort  help to improve these things, Its just Big Society stuff before the freakin govn highjacked the phrase.

[Malcolm]

I had a look at their feeds to be and these don't seem operational to any great extent - they are supposed to get feeds from the British Dragonfly society and BTO to name but two and there is really sparse data there. I looked for some of the species I had entered in the Bird Track site and it isn't there although it is on the BTO site. Shame really, probably they are underfunded for what they are trying to do.