Starting Out

An article published in WWBIC's newsletter.

A Rolling Stone Gathers No Moss

Matt Sutton, ecological consultant and farmer, describes the challenges of learning mosses and liverworts

Well, I was hardly Keith Richards but life was generally too fast-paced to pay much attention to the more subtle or hidden elements of the landscape. Like many naturalists, I started out as a birder, then learnt flowering plants – enough to get my first job in Wales as a surveyor for CCW. Working on the Phase II Grassland Survey meant that I needed a basic knowledge of bryophytes, and I was sent on an FSC course in Pembrokeshire. I did randomly pull the first county record of the liverwort Pallavicinia lyelli out of some rank moor-grass tussocks during the course, but by the end of the third day, every new name that went in seemed to dislodge two from before. I didn’t have the staying power for the evening microscope sessions, and sloped off to the pub. Despite my failings, I was more or less safe recording quadrats in dry grassland – many had little more than a couple of common species, and in more varied habitats I bagged up samples for more experienced colleagues to identify.

When I moved on to Conservation Officer duties, Sam Bosanquet arrived in Pembrokeshire to take over Phase II survey work. He was somehow already an expert bryologist in his early twenties, and it’s not as if he’d skipped the bird and higher plant stages. I collected a few things for him from SSSIs or habitat creation projects I was responsible for, but his herculean efforts in single-handedly mapping the county bryo-flora went largely unnoticed by me at the time.

It wasn’t until I bought some land and left CCW that my appreciation of natural history began to mature properly. My childhood love of patch recording returned and when I’d exhausted the higher plants and birds and had a fair stab at the fungi, I thought it probably time to dust down my copies of Smith’s moss book, and Paton’s liverworts. I was relieved to discover that there was now a field-guide with photos which made the subject a lot more accessible and not always dependent on keys. And Sam’s county flora, published in 2010 with the assistance of WWBIC, was of course an invaluable resource. It soon became apparent that I needed a compound microscope to progress, and I had to build an office of sorts just to have a desk to put it on.

Learning a different branch of natural history is like learning a new language – it’s easier to learn Russian if you can already speak in half a dozen other different tongues. However, my early submissions to Sam as vice-county recorder were characterised by lots of schoolboy errors and ridiculously speculative claims. I struggled in particular to appreciate the variations within species, and kept getting thrown by immature specimens. But thanks to his patience, I persevered and after a year or two felt ready to start venturing off the farm. One or two of my interesting finds on the local Saundersfoot coast, like Dicranella subulata on slumping clay cliffs, proved correct, and even some of my failed id’s turned out to be rarities – the second Philonotis rigida for the county, and the first modern record of Hymenostylium recurvirostrum.  

Philonotis rigida near Saundersfoot

Sam’s assertion that the major distribution patterns were all worked out and I wouldn’t find anything too dramatic provoked me into action and I tried to find places that he may not have got to - working further down cliff slopes, up crags or into quarries than might have been sensible at times. The paradox of bryology as an extreme sport appealed. The other appeal was the seasonality, as my summer workload stopped me from studying insects or higher plants properly – dedicating a couple of months at the end of the year to poking about in quiet, wild places was a chance to unwind after a manic summer. These subtle plants may not have the spectacular appeal of a rare orchid, but I love what they say about a place – the interplay of geology, history and climate which marks a particular rock face, streambank or dune hollow as special.

For the last four years now, I’ve turned my attention to bryophytes for two or three months in the autumn. Tom Ottley has become a most supportive mentor, and I’ve helped him where possible with his recording efforts in Ceredigion. Now slow-moving enough to find the smallest specimens and patient enough for long evenings in front of the microscope, my rarity-finding abilities have increased. Thus far I’ve found seventeen new species for Pembrokeshire and a handful for Ceredigion, as well as filling in lots of gaps at the hectad and tetrad levels. Some of these finds have even upset the known distribution patterns – Cephaloziella dentata was previously only known from the Lizard heathlands in Cornwall but there are now dots on the map for Stackpole and Castlemartin, whilst the tiny, ephemeral moss Micromitrium tenerum, only seen in Wales before in Anglesey in the 1970s, turned up after some heavy fence-line disturbance adjoining our farm boundary. I’ve also been rewarded with a couple of paid bryophyte survey jobs, and the Cephaloziella dentata finds were made during a monitoring contract for NRW. Although Stackpole and Castlemartin were previously subject to detailed survey, this work has also yielded county firsts in the form of the nationally scarce liverworts Leiocolea badensis, Cephaloziella integerrima, Cephaloziella rubella and Scapania cuspiduligera, and the mosses Pottiopsis caespitosa, Microbryum curvicollum and Aloina rigida.  This thoroughly proves the bryologists adage that ‘the best sites always have more’. It also shows that with perseverance and the generous help of county recorders, it is possible to get beyond the hapless beginner stage and start contributing useful records. I do still get caught out by the common species on many occasions though…..

Low cloud on the southern flank of Mynydd Preseli.

 A couple of shaded boulders in a rocky stream running south of Carn Menyn were found to hold Harpalejeunea molleri. This tiny, humidity-demanding liverwort is very rare in west Wales, and was previously known only from the Cothi Gorge in Carmarthenshire and Cwm Rheidol in north Ceredigion.

Harpalejeunea molleri