A Beginner’s Approach to Natural History
By: Johannes Evans
Tags: Natural History, Nature, Photography, Self Isolation

One of the exciting things about becoming an amateur naturalist — a student of natural history, and a keen observer of animal and plant life around oneself — is that the world suddenly seems to become much larger.

When you go for a walk, not knowing their names, all you see is birds. Sure, you recognise your standard pigeons and crows, but that’s about it. They might be different sizes and loiter in different places, they might have different feathers, but that’s all they are: birds.

But once you learn their names? Once you know the difference between them? Then, you don’t see birds anymore: you see the wood pigeon and the ring-collared dove, the coal tit and the great tit, the robin and the song thrush, the jackdaw, the rook, the magpie… The world seems that much larger, and that more densely populated.

And you can make the world larger still — you can stop seeing trees, and start seeing oaks, maples, birches; you can stop seeing butterflies, and start seeing cabbage whites, painted ladies, red admirals; you can stop seeing weeds, and start seeing spleenwort, herb robert, ragwort, red valerian, and countless others.

By no means do I know the names of everything I see out on a walk, or even out the front of the flat, sometimes, but just knowing a handful of names makes the world seem that much bigger, and in a time where our personal worlds have been squeezed down to 2km stretches around our homes, every little bit helps.

My interest in naturalism is relatively recent, but is also something I’ve pretty much always carried.

The author, then aged 9, examining the wildlife. Crete. © Johannes Evans

When I was a little boy, like most children, I was fascinated by the natural world, and would frequently appear at the side of friends and relatives with some new creepy-crawly in hand, apparently oblivious to their lack of interest (or sheer dread) in the idea of holding it themselves.

Walks in the olive groves around my grandparents’ home on Crete, or around rock pools at the coast, left me utterly fascinated by anything that I could find, and by the time I was seven, I would excitedly rush around with a net in hand, catching small fish, crustaceans, and molluscs on beaches, or catching dragonflies, beetles, and butterflies in fields and groves alike. Fascinated by the animals I caught, I would usually examine them in careful detail, interested in the way different creatures moved or behaved.

A stream near Mathern, Monmouthshire, a regular destination on childhood walks. © Johannes Evans 2014

At home in Wales, I would often ask the names of different plants we could eat from the woods on evening walks — wild strawberries, blackberries and more rarely, raspberries, red and black currants, gooseberries, wild garlic, hazelnuts, mint — and watch spellbound when a new and exciting animal was pointed out to me: a badger passing by in the night, a pheasant rushing by in the woods at the edge of the road, or hedgehogs, robins, thrushes, that would pass through the garden.

Having grown up in the Wye Valley, my father’s side of the family could usually point out edible plants and most of the common garden birds — robins, song thrushes, blackbirds, etc. I was very lucky to be able to ask questions and get immediate answers about what this or that was, but there were gaps in my family’s knowledge — the names of trees beyond oaks and birches, the names of non-edible plants or forest flowers, the names of different butterflies and other insects, didn’t come so quickly to hand.

I always sort of fantasised about being able to know the names of things when I went out and about, but guide books always struck me as really difficult to use — they expected too much foundational knowledge of you, like certain words used to describe plant leaves or wings or behaviour, and in any case, if you were looking at anything alive, like a bird or a bug, by the time you’d flicked through to the correct page, if you could even find it, it had probably flown or scuttled away. It wasn’t that the guidebooks were no good — it was that I was no good at using them, and didn’t know how to approach the learning curve.

I never lost interest in the plants and animals around me, but I sort of gave up on ever learning their proper names.

The turning point, for me, was a few years ago when I attended a talk by Colin Stanley, a Galway-based photographer and lepidopterist — it was a talk in the Galway City Public Library about the Galway Butterfly Project. Working with Biodiversity Ireland, the Project seeks to educate people in the recognition of different species of butterfly found in Galway and the surrounding area, ideally to encourage them toward contributing to a local monitoring scheme.

A Speckled Wood butterfly, found along the River Corrib here in Galway. © Johannes Evans 2019

Showing us different photographs that he’d taken, he highlighted a lot of the most common butterfly and dragonfly species in the area — many of them I’d seen before, but never known the names of, and now I knew enough to recognise some of them.

With my interest in the art of naturalism renewed, I went home and began Googling resources for learning about nature, especially about insects, online. These days, there are so many more resources than I could ever have dreamed of as a child, and so many of them make approaching learning about nature far easier and far more accessible than they ever were before.

I fell in love with a website called iNaturalist, which you can access from your desktop or as an app. iNaturalist has pretty much changed the landscape of how I examine wildlife and has taught me so, so much about different flora and fauna.

A red-breasted robin who posed for me at Bristol Zoo. © Johannes Evans 2019.

iNaturalist is very simple to use: either record a sound (for example, the call of a frog or bird) or take a photograph, and upload it. You can also log your observations with sketches or notes, but sounds and photos are better.

Note with your upload — which should be one species per upload, with separate posts for different creatures — the time and date that you saw it, and the location. If you’re uploading from a digital camera or your phone, the time stamp will often be automatically embedded in the metadata of the photograph, so that might be filled in for you.

Under the section that says species, you can make a stab at the classification yourself, but if you really have no idea at all, you can just be vague about it. If it’s a spider, you can sort it under Spiders; if it’s a flower, you can sort it under Flowering Plants. Normally, as soon as you start typing in “flower” or “plant” or “mushroom”, it will offer you a series of options, and you can just put in the nearest classification you’re certain of.

A Coach Horse Beetle larva, found under a big rock in Cappagh Woods, Galway. © Johannes Evans 2018

One of the incredible things iNaturalist does, however, is scan the photograph or sound you’ve uploaded and gives you a guess as to what it might be — if you put in location data, it will even put up species it thinks are a likely match, and are often found close by.

Once you’ve uploaded your observation, other people in your local community will be able to access your observations and be able to join in making classifications!

If you’ve just put up a rough category you think your observation belongs in, other members in the community might work to refine it. They might recognise the species right off the bat, and put that in — if not, they might refine the category more in order to make it easier for experts in that field to find, such as refining a category down to a genus or a family.

If you’ve made a mistake in your observation, other members of the community might disagree, and correct you. For example, you might have uploaded a photograph of one of these…

A lovely harvestman (Opilio parietinus) on my stoop here in Galway. © Johannes Evans 2019

… and put it under Spiders. But pictured is a harvestman, and although we often call them harvestman spiders, they aren’t spiders at all! They are arachnids, like spiders are (as well as scorpions, ticks, and some others), but they’re in a separate category to spiders — much in the same way that a butterflies and beetles are both insects, but fundamentally very different to one another.

When I first started out using iNaturalist, everything seemed a bit difficult to tell apart, but the more that I use it, and the more that I browse the observations made in my local area, the more confident I feel identifying different animals myself. I often get it wrong! But like many things, identifying animals and plants is one of those things that you learn by doing, and with the option to just upload photos or audio clips, you can learn just while walking around and doing other things.

A Mediterranean House Gecko, nestled a crack in the steps out the back of my grandparents’ house. Makrygialos, Crete. © Johannes Evans 2019

iNaturalist even has a little “mission” section on its phone app where it will recommend species for you to keep an eye out for — local species that you might see in your area, and might want to seek out.

The wonderful thing about beginning to get an interest in natural history is that you really don’t even need to leave your garden to do it — there are all sorts of bugs, birds, and other critters to be found in your front garden, and if like me you don’t have a front garden, you can always hang bird feeders from your windows or scatter birdseed on your balcony. Even just under your porch or under the stairs, you might see all sorts.