Lockdown, lookup
Short or long, the list of things lost in Lockdown 1.0 is, while we pace this limited space, less helpful to me than the list of things I’ve found. What is a marine biologist to do when the door to the sea is firmly shut and labelled, **ACCESS DENIED**? Am I a [marine] biologist? Surely I could just wander through that electronic pile of unsifted sea images and bring a little order to chaos, finally file the un-filed? But then the school bell rings, the day starts and my mind spins out to new duties and concerns and I see that time is fractured in this place and though I try I cannot bend it, knit it, beyond what it is. I am Bill Murray in Groundhog Day and pictures of the sea look back to what used to be and I need to look forward or around, to see the way through.
That’s it. This territory has been described in Xavier de Maistre’s, ‘A Journey Around My Room’, it is an opportunity however unwanted, to tilt at the windmill of Pascal’s thought that, “The sole cause of man’s unhappiness is that he does not know how to stay quietly in his room”. So yes, I am a [marine] biologist and while one tag might be boxed in, the other is free. Daughter? Check. Garden? Check (phew!). Camera on macro? Check! It’s time to take a journey around our garden, to see what the world brings to us and boy, does she deliver! The multitudes are here! Over 12 species of Bee, 7 species of ladybird, hoverflies in abundance, bugs, butterflies, moths... a magical cornucopia of life. We record and record and record and later I upload these tiny parcels of data to iRecord so that others might benefit and these moments in time, are not lost (Table 1).
That’s it. This territory has been described in Xavier de Maistre’s, ‘A Journey Around My Room’, it is an opportunity however unwanted, to tilt at the windmill of Pascal’s thought that, “The sole cause of man’s unhappiness is that he does not know how to stay quietly in his room”. So yes, I am a [marine] biologist and while one tag might be boxed in, the other is free. Daughter? Check. Garden? Check (phew!). Camera on macro? Check! It’s time to take a journey around our garden, to see what the world brings to us and boy, does she deliver! The multitudes are here! Over 12 species of Bee, 7 species of ladybird, hoverflies in abundance, bugs, butterflies, moths... a magical cornucopia of life. We record and record and record and later I upload these tiny parcels of data to iRecord so that others might benefit and these moments in time, are not lost (Table 1).
Table 1. Species recorded and entered into iRecord during the Covid-19 Lockdown, March 2020 – June 2020
iRecord
I have not included entries here from previous years. In fact, it is as easy to add records retrospectively, as it is to add current records. This is a great feature which I hope to exploit more in due course for lots of marine work from the last ten or twenty years. I’m sure some of you must have similar backlogs and, may have been on the NBN Atlas and thought, “well I have records for that blank area in the distribution”? There are also ways of batch-loading records, though I’ve not tried that as yet. Adding records via the app on your phone is not difficult. Once you’ve opened the app you simply tap on the ‘+’ symbol, begin to type in the species name and a helpful drop-down menu will appear based on what you’re typing. Then it’s the usual Location, Date, Comment, Abundance, Stage, Sex, Identifiers and the all-important requirement for adding images (however, not all fields need to be, or can be in some cases, entered). There is a helpful Guidance pdf available from the website and of course the app has a ‘Help’ section in the Menu. I highly recommend downloading the app and giving it a try but be warned, you may find it a little addictive, or perhaps that’s just me!
I have not included entries here from previous years. In fact, it is as easy to add records retrospectively, as it is to add current records. This is a great feature which I hope to exploit more in due course for lots of marine work from the last ten or twenty years. I’m sure some of you must have similar backlogs and, may have been on the NBN Atlas and thought, “well I have records for that blank area in the distribution”? There are also ways of batch-loading records, though I’ve not tried that as yet. Adding records via the app on your phone is not difficult. Once you’ve opened the app you simply tap on the ‘+’ symbol, begin to type in the species name and a helpful drop-down menu will appear based on what you’re typing. Then it’s the usual Location, Date, Comment, Abundance, Stage, Sex, Identifiers and the all-important requirement for adding images (however, not all fields need to be, or can be in some cases, entered). There is a helpful Guidance pdf available from the website and of course the app has a ‘Help’ section in the Menu. I highly recommend downloading the app and giving it a try but be warned, you may find it a little addictive, or perhaps that’s just me!
More images from this work are available here.
Citation
This article was originally published in the Autumn 2020 edition of the Bulletin of the Porcupine Marine Natural History Society and can be cited as follows:
Barfield, P. D. (2020). Lockdown, lookup. Bulletin of the Porcupine Marine Natural History Society, No. 14, 79-82. ISSN 2054-7137.
© Sea-nature Studies, 2020. All rights reserved in all media.
This article was originally published in the Autumn 2020 edition of the Bulletin of the Porcupine Marine Natural History Society and can be cited as follows:
Barfield, P. D. (2020). Lockdown, lookup. Bulletin of the Porcupine Marine Natural History Society, No. 14, 79-82. ISSN 2054-7137.
© Sea-nature Studies, 2020. All rights reserved in all media.