As Emmet and I are walking Loe Pool this week, I thought it was time to revisit and share notes I have about the place. The following words are taken from a meeting with Sarah Myles of the Cornwall Wildlife Trust, which took place some time ago, when I first started research for this project.

After Reviewing 179 pages of Loe Pool habitat flora and fauna data, Sarah Myles shared her knowledge of the area. Together, we were then able to visualise how this data could be articulated to represent the lake in a way that would inspire…We talked about how it’s a place

Where sea meets fresh water
Where saltwater fish meet freshwater fish
Where dolphins are stranded, where whales are sighted
Where birds of prey cross, and she said imagine it’s a place
Where the Monarch Butterfly approaches from America
Where Clouds of Yellow Butterflies appear from Spain

It has cliffs, wetland, a pool and a forest
It has running water, freshwater and seawater

It’s a very important area for wintering birds
You should show where the birds of prey cross
Remember all the different gulls, this could be a place to help people learn how to identify them

Highlight such features as wind direction - show things like,
Where the Clouds of Yellow butterflies are coming from
You could show how the autumn hurricanes are connected to butterfly sightings

Highlight day and night - show bats and moths
Show that the Lesser Bat is found in the South West of England, and here it is in Cornwall. You could show daylight cliff sightings of humpback whales and dolphins

Highlight climate change - it’s a very important area for this
To help highlight this you could map Leather Heads, Logger Heads and Trigger Fish

Highlight the Bluebell wood, which is very important to Europe
It’s one of England’s oldest Bluebell woods and so it’s also of national importance – the Spanish Bluebell is what people plant, however it’s not the indigenous bluebell. The indigenous bluebell is loosing ground across England to the Spanish Bluebell

After reviewing the 179 pages of flora and fauna data, and exploring its potential, Sarah concluded the following entries were important for me to think about pulling from their records, and were important to visualise. Criteria were two-fold - it was important that we centred on what was of interest to the public because it would help to educate them about what was rare, indigenous, of national importance, of climate change importance, could indicate seasonal changes, was under threat. However, it was also important that there would be entries that would be attractive to the public because of their history or beauty or novelty or humour.

Please note, the list does need to be signed off by the Wildlife Trust, and my data agreement needs to be updated. Also, some names have yet to be noted in full, and spellings need to be checked off. I will clean this list up in due course.

Moths
* Tiger Moth
* Rustic Sand Moth

Butterflies
* Clouded Yellow Butterfly – migrants, come in with warm weather from Spain, love the food plant Clover
* Monarch Butterfly – it’s American, coming from Hind oven [?]
* Meadow Brown Butterfly – found on the cliffs
* Greater Butterfly – it’s with orchids [?]
* Tortoise Shell Butterfly – found in the nettles
* Blue Butterfly - on the cliff, it likes grass, likes sedge and egg and bacon [?]
* Gatekeeper Butterfly - in meadows and in grassland
* Eggs and Bacon / Puss and Boots / Poached Egg plant and butterfly[?]

Snails
* Reversed Tree Snail - likes the lichens
* Wandering Snail

Birds
* Sand Martin - found on the cliffs
* Little Owl – dienial [spelling] - goes to sleep on a branch, you can see them at night
* Lots of waders…[make list]
* Sedge Warbler – wetland bird
* Celt [?] - all warblers [make list]
* Reed [?]
* Common [?]
* Tree Creepers - walk up trees, but they can’t walk back down
* Holcus Lanatus – like [?]
* Nut Hatch – is the only bird that can walk up and down a tree
* Coot – white, the Moorhen is red, something that people need to learn
* Pied Flycatcher
* House Martin
* Swift
* Swallow – the whole family is there
* Green Woodpecker – remember the story of bagpuss
* Reed Warblers – in the reed grass
* Yellow Wagtail
* Grey Wagtail – like running water, by the bits of rivulets joining the pool
* Owls – include them, [make list]
* Red [something] King Grey [something]

The sea
* Pollock
* Basking Dolphin [?]
* Basking Shark
* Sea Bass – European type, found in Falmouth and Helford

This site for the Sea Bass is one of the main breeding sites in Europe, and this is why the place is a designated area [follow up].

We discussed the difficulties of representing flora data. The difficulty allies with the problem of how to represent geographical data because it’s about polygon data and is attached to OS copyright licences. Although fauna can be difficult because it moves, it can still be mapped using specific point data – whereas flora spreads out, and is a maze of ‘things’ and is mapped out as polygon data.

Sarah explained how I should develop an abstract picture about certain plants to help give some overall feeling of the landscape – so I couldn’t get hung up on too much data. To help with this she suggested I go out with a botanist to build this picture. For instance, at times, places on the cliffs are pink and the Sedges are the dominant grass found on the cliffs [and something else]. She said I could compare the cliffs and their Pink Thrift to that of the harder outline of the Hottentot Fig, which arrived from Africa [and is causing problems].

Flora
* Pendulous Sedge - a wetland plant
* Lesser Spearwort - in the marsh
* Moneywort - if it’s there, recorded in 1959
* Wild Thyme – spotted conne marine [?]
* Mushrooms – ones that are red and yellow and waxy [?]
* Kidney Vetch – attracts a lot of insects, butterflies like it, it’s on the cliffs,
* Small Heath – look at the heath and coastal grassland
* Natural Reed Grassland - on top of the cliffs
* Sea Holly - on the cliffs
* Sedge
* Reed
* Hostache [spelling] - salt living plant
* Willow Carr
* Woollen Heath [spelling] – robust, doesn’t damage easily, good for walkers
* Pink Thrift – patches of it
* Common [?] Grass - now on the wayside of motorways, due to salt on roads
* Yellow Iris - on the side of the lake
* Spindle Tree – in the woods, it’s very rare
* Wildserver Tree – from the1800s, this is an ancient woodland

Importantly, Sarah was interested in combining aerial with elevated material as well highlighting the fact that freshwater and seawater meets. In a further meeting, she also responded to a first prototype idea I had built at the time, in which you could move the mouse through an elevated map of the lake and produce different speeds of travel. One speed was as if you were walking the lake, the fastest speed was as if you were biking the lake. She liked the idea of walking, biking and standing at certain cross roads that belonged to the lake. She pointed out that this project should seek to clearly present the bridal ways of the lake. She highlighted the fact that it’s an important area for fishing and bird watching. She said it would be interesting to link in the archaeology of the area because this would develop a human factor to the project. At this time, I had only explored flora and fauna on the prototype, although I had viewed a GIS database that totally concentrated on historical data about Cornwall.

Suggested follow up material:

Book
Colour identification Guide to Moths of the British Isles
ISBN 0-670-80354-5
Cornwall Butterfly Atlas

Paper
Tony Stebbing has published a paper on warm species

Copyright
Look at artist Philip Hughs. He did paintings about the tin route in Cornwall. He uses a bronze finish to the paintings and it’s about abstract painting. He got permission to use aerial photographs to create a 3-storey banner. He is creating landscapes by using painting and aerial photographs

Wildlife law
http://www.ukbap.org.uk - list priority areas in Britain. Say whether legally protected
Look at Wildlife and countryside act 1991. Updated in 1997.
European laws – look at Europe and habitat designations

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