Worcestershire Record No. 18 April 2005 p. 2

Newsletter of Worcestershire Recorders and the Worcestershire Biological Records Centre.

Harry Green

Hopefully subscribers and readers will find something of interest in this issue. If you would like to modify the mix of articles please write something we can publish! Anything connected with biological records and recording will be welcome. I expect to produce the next issue in November 2005 so please send your contribution by early October at the latest, if possible.

Ideally please send your article on disc (either floppy or CD) or via email zen130501@zen.co.uk. Always send a good quality print-out with your disc. Providing the system works email gives me least work. Send your article as an attached file and pictures, diagrams etc as separate files.

PLEASE DO NOT SEND YOUR ARTICLE WITH COMPLEX LAYOUTS AND FORMATTING! PLEASE DO NOT CONVERT TO COLUMNS ETC. I need simple text! .txt, .rtf or .doc files readable by Microsoft Word are all satisfactory. Tables are fine in Excel. Also scanning for OCR is usually best from a simple text layout. My OCR system does not always like two-column lists for example and sometimes scrambles the lot. Please don’t underline, centre, and use Microsoft standard layouts! If you do so I have endless work undoing it all!

It is best if you indicate the ideal position of tables, drawings, graphics maps etc in the text but send them on separate sheets of paper, or as separate files, or at the end of the article. This avoids formatting difficulties when converting to two columns etc, and I can more easily insert or scan and size the graphics for insertion if necessary.

If you do not have access to a PC or the correct software please send a clear typescript preferably in biggish typeface of around 12-point for easy scanning and OCR - smaller type size and less-than-good photocopies increase the OCR error rate!

I can cope with clear hand writing though it obviously takes longer as I have to key it in, but do not let this prevent you sending hand-written articles. I can probably bend a helpful arm if necessary.

Illustrations: The Worcestershire Record is produced by commercial fairly high-quality photocopying. This copes well with line drawings but only moderately well with photographs. If you send hard copy photos then prints are best, but my new equipment is now good at scanning transparencies. Or, better still, send jpeg files which are not too huge! Digital cameras save a lot of time! Pictures need to be simple and clear for the photocopying system to give reasonable results. Sorry, but we can rarely use colour in the printed version of Worcestershire Record but we can use it on the web site. It is best if you can send colour photos which I can then convert to grey-scale as necessary, and we can use them in colour on the web site.

Send your articles to Harry Green, Windy Ridge, Pershore Road., Little Comberton, Pershore, Worcs., WR10 3EW. Or send them email to zen130501@zen.co.uk. (If you have another email address for me please delete it as it no longer works!). Or you may send them, marked for Harry Green’s attention, to Worcestershire Biological Records Centre, Lower Smite Farm, Smite Hill, Hindlip, Worcester, WR3 8SZ.

Worcestershire Mammal Atlas Project

We have about another year to run on this project and we need more records! Please make a great effort to send in all records of mammals. The Atlas will give an excellent snapshot of the status of mammals in Worcestershire in the decade spanning 2000. Recording forms available from WBRC office – address on back page.

This edition contains an interesting article on finding the remains of small mammals in discarded drinks cans. John Dodgson obtained a ‘hit rate’ of a mammal record for about every five cans he examined (no, no, not in city waste bins!). This is pretty astonishing from a conservation point of view and also provides a very useful method of increasing the number of records of small mammals. I suggest you wander along lanes and byways looking for cans, checking the contents, making records and either taking the cans for re-cycling or stamping them flat so they cannot catch more mammals. But don’t get run over! Also it would be very interesting if you could record your “hit rate” and let us know.

Recording breeding birds of Conservation Concern.

We are short of local information on the distribution of Red and Amber listed birds and have set up a system to collect records. See article in this issue. This is intended to be a mainly web-based survey. Please download the recording form from the website and send your results in by email if possible.

We were very pleased to receive records for this scheme. It does need to be focussed – please read my note in this issue. For the listed species we would like confirmed breeding records based on one record, one place, one year, and suggest a “place” could be a 1x1 km square. Again systematic survey of a tract of countryside would be most useful.

The Register of Worcestershire’s Ancient Trees is steadily accumulating information – we need more recorders! We have now records of over700 trees but there are still many more out there! Full instructions were included in Worcestershire Record No 12 together with report forms. Included in No 17 was a list of all the trees recorded to that date so you can check which have been recorded. Some parts of the county are under-recorded. We do urge you to get out there and record trees. If you need more copies of forms or instructions please let me know. They can be sent to you by email if you wish and you can send completed forms with photographs by email directly to John Tilt john.tilt2@btopenworld.com