A couple of weeks back I did a bit of online shopping and treated myself to yet more beetle books. One of these caused me a fair bit of umming and aahing before I finally bit the bullet and ordered the damn thing. This is the book in question
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| I think it should be 'A Checklist of the Beetles of the British Isles', but then they didn't ask for my opinion. |
You'll have to excuse the stereotypically Scottish tartan carpet in the background. I ripped up all of the reception, lobby, bar and conservatory carpets last week, they are soon to be replaced with a soulless representation of floorboards. Anyway, I grabbed a bit for myself and carved it into a rug for my room. It's the MacDonald tartan, the MacDonalds being one of the larger clans in this area (there's one buried in the cemetery called Ronald - I kid ye not!) The rug helps to keep my toes warm, laminate flooring can get very cold. Though maybe if I didn't wander around barefoot all evening long...
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| Guess who snuck the ONLY surviving bit of original carpet into his room :) |
So I bought the Checklist and began flipping through the pages. Yup, it's a list alright! Reading the blurb near the front, the author goes into detail regards the various uses of this checklist. One such use is 'to provide a standard systematic arrangement for setting out a collection or preparing a faunistic study such as a county monograph'
Or to correctly rearrange the sequencing of my own beetle lifelist, which appeals greatly. So I set to comparing my own beetle list against the Checklist, found a couple of errors (on my part, not with the Checklist...) and essentially re-ordered the bulk of it to follow the family ordering as per the book.
Oh yeah, I noticed that by the end of it all I'd rather carelessly managed to lose two whole species. Bloody Checklist, I should've saved my money.
I've adjusted my PSL totals accordingly, as can be seen here. Somehow I'm still behind that confounded Tony fella - and he claims to not even look at beetles! I'll overhaul him soon though, he'll be up to his eyeballs in Wood Warblers before he knows it and I'll be waving my sweep net at him as I cruise on by in a few months time (or so he boldly claims...)
By the way, the Checklist is brilliant, though it required a bit more detective work regards some of the taxonomical updates than I'd expected. Involvulus icosandriae (was Rhynchites caeruleus) took longer to unravel than was absolutely necessary, for instance.
As an aside I've ordered myself two plastazote-lined storeboxes from W&D. I already have an empty one. I plan to fill these with the coleoptera, diptera and hemiptera that I shall be tackling this year, one order per box obviously. I ordered them on the 2nd January. On the 5th January I received a confirmation email and I've been checking for parcels ever since. Today (15th January) I received a further email telling me that the items had now been despatched. Bloody hell, I can only hope that they'll arrive in another month or so, probably hand-delivered by a heavily moustached gentleman riding a Penny Farthing.
By sheer happenstance, this was the view I enjoyed last October in the heart of Chelmsford. Look closely, now!
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| W&D special delivery coming through! Make way! In the name of the King, Make way! |
