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Ian Barthorpe

When was the last time you did a stocktake of your home and garden? Not just a tidy up or spring clean, but a full-blown count of every plant in the garden or every different item of clothing in the wardrobe.

As part of our 70th anniversary celebrations, we’re running a stocktake of our own at RSPB Minsmere nature reserve, starting today and continuing until Sunday 4 June.

Luckily we don’t have to count every single avocet or bunny or caterpillar, although we do count many of these as part of our regular survey work and monitoring.

Instead, we’re counting every different type of bird, mammal, insect, plant and fungi (and whatever else we can find) as part of Minsmere’s first ever bioblitz.

A bioblitz is a fancy name for a count of wildlife over a certain period of time: this could be an hour, 24 hours or a week.

At Minsmere, we’re extending our bioblitz over nine days throughout the May half term. This is partly due to the sheer enormity of the task of counting all our wildlife, but also to allow more of you, our visitors, to help us.

Over the past 70 years, about 5700 different species have been identified at Minsmere. Some of these have only been seen once or twice. Others require a microscope to confirm the ID, or will only be found in winter. Therefore, we don’t expect to come close to finding all of these species, but we’re eagerly anticipating the challenge of trying to locate as many as possible.

Of course, such a challenge requires lots of eyes and ears, and as well as our excellent team of RSPB staff and volunteers, we’ve drafted in expert help from the around the county. We’d also like your help.

We're started small, focusing today's efforts on some of the commoner and easier to identify species such as birds, mammals, butterflies, dragonflies and flowering plants. As a result, we've only found about 200 species today, but we expect that total to increase considerably once we start looking for some of moths, flies, spiders and fungi that are found at Minsmere.

Even so, we've found a few interesting species today. Highlights include:

  • the Savi's warbler at Island Mere, where a honey-buzzard also flew over and bitterns were regularly seen. Not forgetting the sticklebacks from the boardwalk, of course, or the southern marsh orchids on the approach path;
  • stone-curlew and lesser whitethroat from the North Wall watchpoint, where a ruby-tailed wasp awaits identification to species level;
  • water voles, water shrews, grass snake, hairy dragonflies, four-spotted chasers, various damselflies, green hairstreak butterfly, great silver diving beetle and water mint at the pond;
  • red-eyed and variable damselflies, common meadow-rue, marsh mallow and celery-leaved buttercup between South Belt Crossroads and the sluice;
  • grey plover, little, Sandwich and common terns, Mediterranean gulls, kittiwakes, avocets, black-tailed godwits, teal and common mallow on the Scrape;
  • garden warbler, oxeye daisy and treecreeper around the Wild Zone and adder at the car park entrance
  • banded demoiselle and brimstone near Eastbridge.

Red-eyed damselfly - one of the species seen in today's bioblitz

In addition, I started a few hours early last night by adding a few species from Westleton Heath. These included nightjar, nightingale, turtle dove, woodlark, Dartford warbler and bell heather.

Why not come along during the week and see how many species you can spot. The full species checklists are available to check in the Discovery Centre. To make it easier for you, we have our exciting 70 species to spot challenge sheet for all visitors, and our volunteers will be present to help. What’s more, by helping out with our bioblitz you can tick off one of the activities in the RSPB Wild Challenge. Why not find out more at www.rspb.org.uk/wildchallenge, or visit us at Minsmere – www.rspb.org.uk/minsmere.