Site of the Week
British Wildlife Guide http://www.lineone.net/wildlife/index.html
There are plenty of websites dedicated to UK wildlife out there, but few of them are as well put-together or have as many species in one place as this one. As well as a minor crash course in conservation, advice on wildlife photography and information about all kinds of British habitat, you’ll find a massive collection of factfiles and pictures of just about every creature in the nation.
Before you get into the individual species, you can read a little about the ways that scientists categorise different types of organisms - animals with and without backbones, for example. Then delve into the database, which is divided up into clear and logical sections like ‘mammals’, ‘birds’ and ‘insects’. Each takes you to a list of species to browse - click one to bring up a short account, complete with photograph and a set of links to related information.
There are a couple of disappointments, however. Though you can browse all the factfiles by group and alphabetically, the lists of species can get rather large and unwieldy. If you’re looking for a particular organism, you could have some trouble unless you know the Latin as well as English name - annoyingly, you won’t find ‘burying beetle’ under ‘B’, it’s down as ‘insect - Nicrophorus vespilloides’ under ‘insects’, and that’s a big section. There is a search facility, though this seems to be set up to scour everything in the site apart from the wildlife database, which isn’t a great deal of help, let’s face it. Overall, if you do have time to persevere, it’s worth it.
Richard Northover
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