With the arrival of winter, now seemed like a good time to look back on a year’s worth of ladybirds and look forward to a new course in 2023.
A New Short Talk
Golly. For someone who shies away from talks of any kind (and don’t even get me started on crowds), Zoom has been a bit of a godsend this year. Rounding off a year’s worth of ladybird recording, this week I recorded the first installment of a two-part series for NHSN looking at my 2022 ladybird year list.
Now, with plenty of fascinating (and quite exciting) species observed this year, I thought it would be nice to recap these in the order they were discovered. Doing so, hopefully, providing a feel for what can be encountered in the North East and importantly, when. Hopefully, the end result isn’t too cringe-worthy but I’ll let you be the judge of that.
I’ll be repeating the ladybird year list in 2023, of course, and look forward to sharing many more finds on this blog.
A New ‘Course’ too!
If you thought an online talk was out of my comfort zone, try a four-week course! Well, I say course in the loosest sense as the upcoming series of events I have planned for NHSN is more of a crash field course than anything. Still, I’m quite excited about this – the plan is to lead four trips to various corners of the North East looking for ladybirds. Lots of them actually, the aim being to see as many of our resident species as possible in a small timeframe. A mini year list, if you will!
This series of walks will see us explore different survey techniques, from sweep-netting and tree tapping to spot of heather-bashing too, and should be good fun. There is a charge but it isn’t a huge one and if you like ladybirds, it might be for you.
Perhaps I’ll see a few of you there but if not, and a course on ladybirds isn’t for you, there’ll be many events on the NHSN website.
