Beetlemania
It was an invitation too good to miss. Martin Collier, Norfolk ’s beetle recorder, had heard about NWT Thorpe Marshes and was keen to visit the reserve to see what he could find. Could I show him around? Writing Christmas cards was postponed and the inevitable family conversations about beetle drives and popular beat combos from Liverpool were put to one side. It was a bright December morning when I joined Martin and recording colleague Steve Lane on the marshes. A bright December day on NWT Thorpe Marshes. Nemostoma bimaculata , a tiny harvestman. Bimaculata means two-spotted. Beetle records on the reserve to date have been mostly relatively big, bright species on summer flowers. Surely an icy day in December was far from promising? How wrong that was. The key technique was a fistful of damp marsh vegetation, often from a ditch edge, shaken through a coarse mesh sieve into a white bowl. The volume of invertebrates, once you had your eye in, was remarkable. Most were ti