Welcome to Apple Wildlife
In this website I aspire to include a page for every wildlife species I encounter. These will contain photos and often comment about identification - particularly if it's something I've struggled with, or if I've learned something that I didn't think was clear from published literature. My aims are:
- For me: a kind of diary of my learning, a handy way of reminding myself when I encounter something another time.
- For verifiers: for taxa I'm less familiar with, explaining how I've identified something or showing evidence for that identification, which I hope will help county recorders or others to verify (or indeed correct) my records.
- For other naturalists: I hope my photos or my experiences with identification challenges will be useful for other people.
By including things in this website I am not claiming expertise. It's inevitable that some mistakes have crept in, particularly for taxa that I'm less familiar with. If you notice any errors or things that could be improved/clarified (or confirmed where I have expressed doubt), please get in touch with me.
Eventually I hope to use this website for other things too, like information about the wildlife in my local area (North Elmham in Norfolk, UK), but it will be a while before I progress that.
I'm building the site with a two-pronged approach:
- Systemmatically:
- Lacewings, snakeflies, alderflies and scorpionflies (because I'm the county recorder so they're of special interest to me)
- Sawflies, jumping plant lice and starting to work on beetles now (in order to support my records submission)
- Birds (in progress: because these are what I've known longest and have most material on)
- Ad hoc: I'm also using these pages as a sort of diary of my learning when I come across new things, so you'll also find a fairly random selection of a whole variety of other taxa covered (scroll down).
Eventually, if I live long enough, I will cover all of the taxa I encounter systemmatically - but this will take years!
Birds (class Aves)
Mammals (class Mammalia)
Ray-finned fish (class Actinopterygii)
Insects (class Insecta)
Popular short-cuts: Bugs | Beetles | Flies | Hymenoptera | Moths | Lacewings
Springtails (class Collembola)
Arachnids (class Arachnida)
Myriapods (class Myriapoda)
Gastropods (class Gastropoda)
Like the Spectacled Weaver's nest below, this website is under construction - please bear with me as I slowly build up the content.
Spectacled Weaver, Zomba Plateau (Malawi), 27th September 2008