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Recording Ladybirds in 2022: a Few Highlights
Ladybirds have been a theme of 2022. Fresh from twelve months of ladybird recording, here’s a quick round-up of the highlights this year.
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Identifying Dead-nettles
Start identifying dead-nettles with a new crib suitable for beginners. Includes most of the species you’re likely to spot in urban habitats.
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Identifying Ragworts and Groundsels
Get started identifying ragworts and groundsels with a brand-new crib sheet suitable for beginners.
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Weekend Botany at Walker
This weekend provided a nice opportunity for our new local botany group to visit Walker Riverside. Here’s what we encountered. Botany (and wildlife recording in…
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Ladybirds: A Short Talk and a New Course
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…
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NBN Award for Wildlife Recording
This week, I was both suprised and delighted to recieve the NBN Newcomer Award for Wildlife Recording.
Current Fascinations
By my own admission, I am prone to falling down rabbit holes from time to time. Typically, this involves deep-diving into a particular subject and learning as much as possible before, inevitably, another topic comes along to take its place. Regardless, below you’ll find my current areas of interest…
Botanical Bits
Botany is my main interest, and whether it’s ferns, snowdrops, grasses, ancient woodland plants, or even humble pavement weeds, I try to spend as much time as possible seeking out our wild plants.
North East Botany
Here you’ll find musings on plant identification, trip reports, sightings from walks and courses and just about anything else relating to botany in North East England.
Urban Flora of Newcastle and North Tyneside
The Urban Flora of Newcastle and North Tyneside is the first comprehensive account of the wild plants growing across the Newcastle and North Tyneside conurbation, one of the largest in the UK.
Based on six years of fieldwork, the book documents more than 1,120 native and naturalised plants -around a third of Britain’s entire flora.
Meet James
Born and raised in North East England, James is a botanist, general naturalist and biological recorder with a passion for sharing the joys of North East nature with others.
He currently works as Senior Naturalist for the Natural History Society of Northumbria (NHSN) and volunteers as a vice-county recorder for the Botanical Society of Britain and Ireland (BSBI), both of which allow him to spend ample time outdoors leading trips, courses, surveys and guided walks.
