Mushroom day

Despite the starter motor in the car being knackered, I still went to Delamere for the fungi day today. There's a train station in walking distance, so I took that option. It was fantastic and totally worth it. I learned so much today, saw some fascinating things, got lots of pictures, and met some lovely people. It's safe to say that I'll be writing about some of the species I saw on this visit for the next several entries on this blog. Looking forward to getting it all onto a computer as posting from a phone totally shortens what you want to say. If you do ever visit Delamere, I recommend the cafe at the station that I'm currently sat in. It does ace tea and scones.

MapInfo at Record

Yesterday was spent working with MapInfo at Record.  I am now pretty much dedicated to using my GIS skills whenever I pop in, which is fine by me as I don't mind a bit of GIS (for my friends, it means geographical information systems).  The last time I was up there, I spent the day digitising site boundaries.  Yesterday I spent the day creating citations -- documents about wildlife sites, essentially.  Not enthralling work, but necessary and good experience.

I'd totally forgotten what a pain GIS can be, however.  Most of the day was pretty productive as I was taking the site data and layering the MasterMap tiles under it and outputting the images.  But I hit a pretty big stumbling block by the end -- the upper Mersey Estuary.  The map tiles contain a *huge* amount of information.  I needed to load up 6 or 7 tiles to get the image I needed because water features cross tile boundaries.  MapInfo kept saying no.  Well, actually, it never said no.  It said "in a minute" and "when I can be bothered"  and "when I feel like it"  and "yes, but I'm going to uncheck this box just to make it more entertaining for us both."  GIS is a cruel master sometimes.

It took me four and half hours create the citation images and sort various queries for around 50 sites.  It took me half an hour to sort just the image for the estuary due to its size.  There's always one, isn't there?

After that, I had a wander around the zoo again, stopping at the Roman garden for a bit before failing to see the otters but finally seeing the warthogs.  They've stopped hiding from me, which is nice!

The week of ecology... and work

I did make it to the woodlands the next day, though I mostly wandered through with the OH, pillaging for blackberries (originally destined for gin, in an ideal world, but finally destined for eating).  Sadly, although it's mixed deciduous woodland with a lot of silver birch and some hazel and oak, the woodland appears to be somewhat over-managed.  I understand removing standing deadwood within 10m of a path (in a way), through H&S, however, in some areas the woodland appears to be managed beyond this.  The knock-on effect is a lack of fungal species.  In this type of woodland, you'd expect to find lots of Birch polypore -- I found two.  Sadly, there also seems to be people "tidying up" the woodland.  I'm all in favour of making places accessible and sure, habitat piles are grand, but... some standing deadwood needs leaving behind.

Last Sunday I went out to a site in Cheshire to study mosses and liverworts.  We spent most of the day squinting at things and I've an entry or two about that coming up (hopefully!).  What *was* nice is that it appears my mycology is coming along nicely and there were lots of bog species (and fungi -- including LOADS of birch polypores!) on this site, including some sundews, which I've never seen before -- again, pictures to follow in a separate entry...

Monday I was at Record again and I spent the day on MapInfo, digitising site boundaries and entering phase 1 survey data, as well as assisting in some database recording and species ID.  Tuesday, I received a book in the mail...

I've only read a chapter or two, but I'm taking it to heart. It's possibly my best purchase of the last little while.  I'm thinking of doing the plant challenges -- and using the blog to help me expand my knowledge base about the plants.  In short -- it's two plants every three days.  I'd be happy to try a species per day for the next working week and then take it from there.  Perhaps game on?

Thursday, I was suppose to go on a bat survey. Only the client cancelled, sadly.  And the ecology firm only told me two hours beforehand -- when I contacted them.  Good communication is so important!  I put in another CV with another firm on Friday.  I also received a rejection letter from the arboricultural surveyor position.  As far as rejection letters go, it's one of the nicer ones I've had:

"We were particularly impressed by your approach and the standard of your work. We will contact you if an opportunity arises where we could employ your skills..."

I knew I was their wildcard.  I'm glad they liked me enough to reply so personally.  I'm going to keep on swimming.  I'll get there.  I know I will.  And to be honest, it was a reply that gave me hope rather than saddened me.  My work is good.  My skills are good.  I'm just not a specialised arboricultural surveyor.


And today?  Today brought me a refund from HMRC for taxes taken in 2005-2006.  Not a bad week all in all!

Gathering Week

Ow.  This last week has been a hammer.

So, Monday -- first day volunteering at Record.  Actually, that was the day of rest and it was really good to get back into using GIS programs (even if it was MapInfo, which isn't my preference).  Still, I'd not done much with digitising NVCs before, so it was a really good experience and this weekend, I'll be doing some mycology off the back of it.  In short, I'll be learning some more about fungi and lichens.  Yes.  I'm weird.  I am aware of this.  Though the weirdest thing about volunteering at a biological records centre was the response to a team member finding a dead bat in one of the storage boxes.  Record collects all the biological sighting data for Cheshire... so of course there was interest in recording the type of bat and it's gender before getting rid of the poor thing (and it's new inhabitants.  Grim).  The bat situation was eventually resolved (and recorded, sadly).  I followed this up with a games evening in the pub, which was quite cathartic and made some new friends, which was good.  I also had a mooch earlier in the day where I spent some time hanging out with the red pandas.  I have to admit to watching one of them with great joy as they munched on one of the hawthornes in their enclosure with every sign of enjoyment.

And then I had a week where I could find no new jobs to apply for.  But that also gave me a week to do leatherworking.  Specifically faction symbols, more guild symbols, a belt with tonnes of pouches, bards sashes, a bandolier... it raised a lot of money for the faction, which is fantastic, plus it covered the make costs, so I'm a happy bunny (see all the tags below!)

Getting those metal stamps made saved my sanity.

Outside of that, the event this last weekend just about broke me. Still, I think I had fun -- I just wish I didn't attempt to get all my exercise for the month in in one weekend.  Yeowch.

As a side note, I now have over 300,000 followers on Pinterest.  I'm still shocked about it, but still -- very cool. It's made me think about adding to this blog and creating some infographics about ecology.