Numbers

I'm very much the type of person who counts things. In fact, I'm a compulsive counter. A barely controllable counter, you could even say. I'll sometimes begin my walk into work and suddenly realise I've been subconsciously counting my steps, or a flock of Jackdaws might swoop overhead and I can't help but to count how many there are. Upon occasion I've sat in bed and counted how many rows of bricks are in my wall (my bedroom is a converted workshop, hence the walls are painted brickwork). Does this put me further towards one end of the spectrum than is entirely normal? Quite probably, yeah. The point being, counting things is in my nature, and I don't really have much control over it.

It was therefore entirely natural for the teenage me to keep a lot of lists pertaining to the wildlife I encountered. It all started with a numbered list of the birds I had seen. Next I kept a numbered list of all the plants that I'd seen. Smaller groupings such as mammals and reptiles and dragonflies were also carefully listed. Eventually I combined all of these smaller lists into one huge great list which I rather grandly named my Organism List. That was a happy day for me; every species I had ever seen written down and numbered in one long list, complete with place and date where known. It was, I felt, a masterpiece! Every subsequent new species was duly added to the Organism List, recorded forever in my scrappy handwriting. Years later I transferred it all onto an Excel spreadsheet and had oodles more fun adding pointless columns and obscure comments. Marvellous.

Fast forward a good few years and Mark Telfer had a simple thought that sparked a movement. He too totted up his master list of everything he'd seen, but instead of calling it his Organism List, as I had done, he dubbed it his Pan-species List. He then asked other naturalists to tally up their own species count and let him know the number. He then compiled the tallies into a table and lo! the Pan-species Rankings Table was born.

Clearly nobody wants to be at the bottom of any such table, though many are quite happy to sit comfortably mid-table. But the more competitive of us enjoy the ever-changing dynamics as folks rise and fall in the rankings. Some years ago I watched in quiet horror as, over a slow period of months, Tim Hodge inexorably drew ever closer to my position in the table, before he inevitably overtook me and has never looked back since. Stephen Plummer did the exact same thing to me shortly afterwards. Kev Rylands and I have been within a hundred or so species of each other for years, though he's widened the gap more recently. I love it, and I'm finally looking likely to go up a place this year, fingers crossed. But that's the lifetime Pan-species List. I'm not a professional naturalist, I don't do this for a living. I'm not retired, I don't have the luxury of time and money to pursue my interests. I live on the tundra (or so it sometimes seems) and not in the species-rich south. So I shall never gain the heady heights of the Top Players on the Rankings Table. And that's fine, I accept it.

But now, thanks to Mike Prince and Andy Musgrove, there is a new 'all-singing-all-dancing' PSL website where we listers can dream up pretty much any list we like and add it to the site. One of the more popular categories of list is the Yearlist. This list, quite unlike the lifelist, starts afresh each year. Everybody begins equally (at zero species) and I use it to keep myself active throughout the year. Being the competitive type, I don't want to see myself at the bottom of the table. Not that it matters a jot, I'm just the type of person who prefers to be nearer the top...

I decided to set myself a target number of living species to see this year. Arbitrarily, I chose 2500 species. I've seen over 2000 species in a year a few times now, but I don't think I've ever seen as many as 2500. To have a chance of achieving that number, I will need to stay active throughout the year and tackle a wide range of species groups. The big numbers are always going to be with plants, fungi and insects. I'm rubbish with fungi, so I'll be hoping that plants and insects will get me a good chunk of the way there.

So, that's one month completed, how am I faring thus far? Let me show you. I'm really rather pleased, even if I do say so myself.

Top 10 PSL Year Listers so far (click the image to enlarge it)

Third place is definitely alright. Obviously second place is better and first place is the goal (not that I'll have a hope of overhauling Tim once his invert season really kicks off). But just check the numbers. In the month of January I recorded five hundred species!!! I don't think I've ever achieved that before. And yes, knowing such a table exists, and seeing that other people are using it, has very definitely spurred me onwards. I've hardly pulled out all the stops; I work split-shifts five days a week which definitely hinders my natural history shenanigans, and the weather has often been crap. But it's a good start and I intend to keep the momentum flowing for as far as I can. Springtime, warmth and inverts are just around the corner, yes?

I don't have a target number for the end of February. Maybe 700 species is a bit overly optimistic? Then again, if I get busy with the sieve and start looking at mosses... I think well over 600 is achievable, I'll find out in four week's time. There's a lot of text in this post, so here are a few images from earlier in the month, all taken on Skye.