Yorkshire Union Yorkshire Naturalists’ Union c/o NEYEDC, St William College, 5 College Street, York YO1 7JF Tel: 01904 641631 Email: [email protected] Website: www.ynu.org.uk Registered Charity No. 224018 The Naturalist Vol. 136 No. 1076 April 2011 Contents p1 Editorial p2 John Wint: President of the YNU, 2010 - 2011 p3 2010 Presidential Address: Alien Plants – An Ecological Perspective G.T.D. Wilmore p15 Pellets: Coughing Up The Truth Or Flight Of Fancy? Anthony Wardhaugh p18 The Crackles Bequest Project Michelle Farrell and Jane Bunting p19 Turnover of freshwater-plant taxa: the example of an ornamental lake in East Yorkshire* R. Goulder p28 Community development among Hemiptera and other insects on a brownfield site in south Leeds* Joseph P. Botting p35 The state of the Union's ichneumon records W.A. Ely p39 The Aculeate Hymenoptera (wasps, ants and bees) of the Lindrick area in Watsonian Yorkshire* Michael E. Archer p45 The Slender Slug Malacolimax tenellus in Yorkshire Adrian Norris and David Lindley p46 The Particoloured Bat Vespertilio murinus found in the East Riding of Yorkshire (VC61) Anthony Lane p47 First records of Leisler's Bat Nyctalus leisleri in the East Riding of Yorkshire (VC61) Anthony Lane p49 A joint meeting to Melton Wood Tom Higginbottom p51 Book Reviews p53 Yorkshire Naturalists’ Union Excursions in 2010 Albert Henderson and Adrian Norris p71 YNU Excursion Circulars 2011 p79 Calendar of Events An asterisk* indicates a peer-reviewed paper. Front cover. Particoloured Bat, photograph by V. Grantham (see p46). Back cover. YNU members and friends at Brockadale, photograph by P. Simmons (see p60). For the full list of Photograph Credits see p70. The Naturalist This publication is issued free to individual members of the Yorkshire Naturalists' Union and to Affiliated Societies. The Editorial Board of The Naturalist is currently: J. Bowers, W. Ely, A. Henderson, A. Millard, P. Simmons, S. West Notice to contributors Contributors should indicate whether they wish their manuscripts to be subjected to anonymous peer review. All other manuscripts will be reviewed by the Editorial Board who at their discretion may send them to third parties for comment and advice. Articles should be submitted electronically as an MS Word document to Dr A. Millard at [email protected]. Scientific names should be italicised. Please avoid the following: • using tabs to tabulate information (please use MS Word table format or separate the column entries in a single row with commas and enter a paragraph mark at the end of the row). • inserting any figures, graphs or plates into the text; indicate their proposed locations in the text and send as separate files. Good quality, high resolution images are very welcome and should be sent as .jpg files, with a separate MS Word file containing the caption and name of the person to whom the image should be attributed. If electronic submission is not possible, contributions should be sent to Dr. A. Millard, Woodland Villas, 86 Bachelor Lane, Horsforth, Leeds LS18 5NF (Tel. 0113 258 2482) Articles should be typed double-spaced and on one side only of the paper. Scientific names of genera and species, but nothing else, should be underlined. Tables and text figures should be prepared on separate sheets of good quality white paper and executed in jet-black Indian ink at 1.5 times the size at which they are intended to appear in The Naturalist. Legends etc. should be submitted on a separate sheet. Hand-written material is acceptable and welcome but should be submitted a month in advance of the copy date. Contributors should ensure the accuracy of reference citations. The Editorial Board and Council accept no responsibility for opinions expressed by contributors. Copy Dates: April issue - 14 February; August issue - 14 June; December issue – 14 October © Yorkshire Naturalists’ Union – 2011 Single copies may be made of single articles in this journal provided that due acknowledgement is made and the copies are for non-profit making educational or private use. Copying of more than one article or multiple copying of a single article is forbidden unless special permission has been obtained from the Yorkshire Naturalists’ Union. Permission is granted for the use of brief quotations in published work provided that acknowledgement of the source is clearly stated but the use of substantial sections of text and any illustrative matter requires the express permission of the Yorkshire Naturalists’ Union. Editorial With the appearance of this first issue of 2011, The Naturalist assumes a new format, mainly the result of three changes. First, in addition to fulfilling its own previous role, it will also subsume into itself the role of the Bulletin. Secondly, there will be fewer issues each year. Thirdly, the journal will be managed by an editorial board. This absorption of the Bulletin into its eminent senior journal enables us to combine the roles of two publications within a single new format journal of economical design and attractive layout, which will be issued three times each year, each issue of 80 pages. The journal will maintain continuity with the traditions and principles which governed its predecessors. This means that it will provide a forum for both peer-reviewed papers such as previously appeared in The Naturalist and also for articles and notes of the sort which appeared in the Bulletin. Like its predecessors it will be dependent upon the scientific calibre, intrinsic interest and liveliness of contributions from the Union’s individual and affiliated memberships as well as from other interested scientists and naturalists. Throughout its long and honourable history The Naturalist has been noted for its inclusiveness of subject matter. The appearance of the comparatively infant Bulletin, if anything, broadened that inclusiveness. A major concern of the editorial team is to reach a wider readership and authorship, and to continue to encourage contributions on the diverse subjects relevant to the Union’s activities and, in particular of course, to its constitutional and charitable purposes. The Field Reports on the Union’s five annual Excursions into the Watsonian vice-Counties are a spinal element in recording the Union’s activities in the field, and we hope to encourage more field notes and accounts, general or detailed, on Yorkshire localities and conservation concerns, especially from the members of the Affiliated Societies and Union Sections. Illustrations and visuals accompanying submitted texts are welcomed. We would also welcome the development of a varied and lively correspondence column on matters relevant to inclusions in the journal. Your editorial team hopes and intends to maintain in this new format publication the standards of recording and reporting on Yorkshire’s “fauna, flora and physical features” which are exemplified in its predecessors. We are dependent on and rely upon you, the membership and others, amateur and professional from the wider biodiversity community, to provide us with the variety of material necessary to achieve this. 1 John Wint: President of the YNU, 2010 - 2011 Born in Chesterfield – which is why I never truly fulfilled my potential at cricket! – I grew up and was educated in south west Sheffield close to the Derbyshire border. I developed an interest in birds (the feathered variety!) as a child though I never really activated this interest until my late twenties. By this time I was pursuing a career in insurance, where I worked for thirty-five years handling claims, mainly related to motor and industrial accidents. I wanted to investigate bird watching more closely and so took a bird watching holiday in East Scotland, immediately discovering a life-long passion. I returned to Scotland many times and almost embarked on a new life there, running a bird watching holiday partnership. I was living in Wakefield and found my way to Wintersett Reservoir where, to cut a long story short, I began a lasting involvement in ringing, an aspect of bird study which I continue to pursue to this day. My ringing exploits have included wader ringing on the Humber and the public demonstrations of ringing at the British Bird Watching Fair. I also ring locally, mainly at two adjacent sites in farmland alongside the River Aire and both about six miles south of Selby close to where I now live. One of these is a mining subsidence flash, now called Beal Carrs, which began to develop in late 1999. This has been my main area of study and has enabled me to learn much about arable farming and the current, desperate plight of farmland birds. I now have eleven years of data for the site and have amassed for it a bird list currently totalling 175 species. I also train others to ring and through this I am now involved in an extremely successful programme of weekend courses run jointly by the British Trust for Ornithology and the Field Studies Council at Flatford Mill, in Suffolk, where ringing is introduced to those who have never experienced it previously. I am Vice-county Bird Recorder for VC63 (South and West Yorkshire), a position which has given me a much wider perspective on the importance of bird recording and also Deputy Chairman and Development Officer within the Union’s Executive. As a Trustee I would like to help increase the participation of the county’s birding community in the centralised collation of data for the benefit of the county’s avifauna generally. I hope eventually to see records for all taxa gathered into a county-wide database. Then the best possible information is available to decision makers at all levels as well as to those who wish to utilise the data for analysis and the promotion of the County’s flora and fauna.