A reminder for the few people still reading the forums.
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Haven’t been here for a while! We are doing Kettering town on Sunday for our new year hunt, hope the snow is gone by then,
…and our local group is hitting the streets of south Norwich on New Years Day (becoming a bit of a regular fixture now). Good luck!
Hi Alyson,
Glad you’re back; what did you find at Kettering? Are you posting any pictures of your finds?
A reminder about the New Year Plant(s in flower) Hunt.
https://nyph.bsbi.org/
While there doesn’t seem to be a great amount flowering in my neck of the woods at the moment, with the mild autumn and winter continuing mild it might be a good year for this, at least for people in the south. On the other hand, last year a colder spell about a week before Xmas put a dent in what was flowering, so perhaps I shouldn’t be counting your chickens before they hatch.
I accompanied a friend on the New Year Plant Hunt today and was astonished at how many flowers we found. Star finds were Celery-leaved buttercup, Geum, Veronica and a Turnip flower. We searched the Hazel trees for a flower but didn’t find any; however, I see from the results on the BSBI’s site that people in England found some. Just a tad too early for them here in central Scotland. Great fun looking though and we were pleased with the flowers we did find.
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It would be good to know what other iSpotters find?
How encouraging - guess then what I might do tomorrow?
This wild hairy thing flowers outside m’window right now. Shouldn’t be!
I wasn’t able to join either of the local plant hunts this year, but Peterborough and Daventry forays each recorded over 50 species. (Facebook page: Northamptonshire and Peterborough Botany)
I managed 29 species on Saturday and 23 on Sunday. Erigeron karvinskianus was the most exotic. (Aurinia saxatilis was also flowering, but I didn’t think it was recordable.) No Anthriscus sylvestris seen in flower. Other non-recordable taxa were Malva verticillata and Sidalcea ‘Rosebud’.
29 and 23 isn’t a particularly good tally, but it’s better than last year. (Last year a mid-December cold snap saw off a lot of still-flowering plants.)
Hope you got out and found some plants-a-flowering. There are no records from Orkney on the BSBI results map, as yet! Today, is the final day. All the best for a Happy New Year 2019 and beyond.
Sounds as though you’ve had a successful plant hunt. We went out again yesterday morning in a howling wind and found more than we’d hoped. My friend even spotted and identified a flowering Jack-by-the-hedge. We only found one cow parsley still flowering. Our most stunning find albeit non recordable was the seed pods of a stinking iris. We’re hooked and are going out again today. Happy New Year 2019 and beyond.
Well…I was held by spiders for some of the time and up to knees in the sea briefly, so only saw non flowering plants!
Must do better for 2019.
The hunt runs from the 29th, so you’re entitled to enter the Pilosella, if you can persuade the web site to accept the correct date.
I feel outdone by the people who get 60 or 70 species, but you normally have to be in a coastal or urban location to manage that. But the Wrexham group did very well.
If you put a tag e.g. New_Year_plant_hunt_2019 or some other such then you could bring all the records together in a project. I have a look at doing this in the past and there have been rather few and it has also been tricky to separate the flowering from non-flowering.
On the other hand you could just make a project without bothering with tags and instead use the group ‘plants’ and a suitable date range for the date observed and just say these were all the plants recorded whether or not in flower. Perhaps also use a wider date range, 25 Dec to 1 Jan so people have a bit longer to get out and do the recording. Could always then manually look through these observations to see which were flowering if that is the main interest.
No worries. The Orkney Field Club members and guests submitted a list. Someone in North Ronaldsay also entered a list. There is an interactive map on the BSBI New Year Day Plant Hunt website which shows all the results.
Thanks. I was just curious about who was taking part and what they found. The interactive map on the BSBI Plant Hunt websites shows the results from across the country. Odd that unlike the rest of UK there were no planned events in Scotland.
We got 53, which is a bit on the low side, but then we chose to do some recording on a major road while the traffic was a bit quiet on New Years’ Day - coastal urban areas are def the best hunting grounds…
It’s the 130 that gets me. I doubt if I could get that in 3 hours of recording before April even without the restriction to plants in flower.
I’m typically getting well over 200 in a day at the moment covering a mix of urban, farmland, woodland and the odd soggy patch in a ‘day’ - which is perhaps only 5 hours bearing in mind we have coffee and biscuits at 10 when we meet and then a good 40 minute break at lunchtime and then someone usually mentions the pub around 1530! I doubt we’re doing more than 4 solid hours at any rate, but an experienced team of 3-4 spotters plus recorder def helps. I agree - 130 species in flower is a tall order… but I suspect that if we were to carefully pre-plan a route taking in a few old housing estates, woodland, coast, wetland etc, with a team of 4-6, covering both sides of the road at once, and ignoring tetrad boundaries, so focusing on NYPH rather than Atlas recording, it would be possible in the more southerly parts of the UK