EDITORIAL

Where will the next generation of recorders come from?

Current school and university curricula provide few or no opportunities to teach either plant and animal identification, or, worse still, the skills and knowledge that underpin identification.

The National Curriculum contains virtually nothing on natural history. School classrooms have lots of decorative material on their walls but few have nature tables or aquarium tanks or vivaria to stimulate interest in natural history. Taxonomy, nomenclature and studies of life cycles of representatives of the major phyla have been removed from GCSE, AS and A2 syllabuses in Biology to make way for more extensive treatment of biotechnology and molecular genetics. The number of university courses in Botany and Zoology falls every year. (34 courses in Botany offered for 2003: compare this with 701 in American Studies, 5799 in Business, 364 in Dance, 2000 in Media and 138 in Slovak; data from www.ucas.ac.uk).

It has been traditional for serious students and recorders of natural history to be more mature people, often those approaching retirement age. However, there are now many competing leisure pursuits easily accessible, and recruitment from this group looks as if it may be falling.

The recorders on the SNS Council report dismally low turnout at field meetings.

They, no doubt for good reasons, are resistant to the notion of introducing a training or education element either into field trips or as an activity in its own right.

In Suffolk we are not yet at crisis point. Nevertheless we must neither be complacent nor ignore the potential situation. Surely we should develop a strategy to forestall the problem? The current newsletter of the Botanical Society of the British Isles (BSBI News) reports progress in a number of areas of its Education Initiative. One that could be implemented locally involves courses that are being run in collaboration with Wildlife Trusts. An experiment in Northamptonshire of running a series of eight one-day workshops on plant identification for young professionals and WT volunteers is now nearing the end of its second year and has been oversubscribed whilst achieving a high level of student satisfaction. Could SNS explore working jointly with SWT in a similar project? Other schemes might be worthy of consideration, such as seeking to find Junior/Assistant Recorders who could be mentored or even provided with bursaries to help them study.

Whatever, I think we must not sit back and do nothing.

SNS Recorders may not yet be listed in the ‘Red Data Book’ but Tree Sparrows and House Sparrows both are. Recently I ventured to discuss their decline with a nice lady member of a nearby farming family with whom I exchange pleasantries when we meet whilst dog-walking. I explained that I had read that it is easier to find a cause for falling numbers in rural areas than in towns. Two important factors seem to be the reduced amount of food from farmland weed seeds and the absence of spilled, harvested grain in fields over the winter because of the winter sowing of cereals. (“Winter wheat” was what I said.) The dear lady responded by telling me that on her farm the winter cereal was barley, so they were not to blame, and, anyway, “Sparrows are messy birds.” Now I think about it, the farms that still have sparrows on the other side of the peninsula are much more messy…

David Walker, Editor

Holbrook, Ipswich, Suffolk

Autumn 2002

Don't forget you can download the whole of each White Admiral as a .zip file.
(Typically under 700 kb)   ~ See the top menu.