A Natural History of Sutton Park

Introduction
Checklists
Booklets
Talk

Introduction

Sutton Park is an area of about 900 hectares (2,200 acres) in the Sutton Coldfield district of Birmingham. It is located in the north of Birmingham, centred roughly at National Grid Reference . Sutton Coldfield was formerly an independent town within Warwickshire, so the Park falls into Vice-county 38 (Warwickshire) for biological recording purposes.

Most of the park has never been cultivated, and is a mixture of woodland and heath with a number of streams and man-made pools. The heaths and bogs are now a rare habitat in the Midlands and support plants and animals not found in the surrounding areas. The park is a National Nature Reserve, managed by Birmingham City Council under a management plan agreed between the council and .

For more general information about Sutton Park, see the .

Starting in about 1988, Peter Coxhead and Harold Fowkes (now sadly deceased) have been engaged on a project to document the natural history of Sutton Park. The work is being published as a series of booklets by the under the general title A Natural History of Sutton Park. Much of the work has consisted of collating existing records, particularly those held by the Biological Records Centre, Warwick Museum. Many other people have contributed their time and expertise, including George and Maurice Arnold (birds), Stefan Bodnar (birds, vertebrates), Malcolm Clark and members of the Birmingham Natural History Society Mycolological Section (fungi), Les Evans (butterflies and moths), Steven Falk and colleagues from Coventry (insects), John Field (bryophytes), Wayne Rixom (spiders) and John Walton (lichens).

Records are constantly being updated (see below for links to checklists on the web). For example, in 2009, a rare parasitic wasp was observed in the Park for the first time. (See the separate web page for more details.)

Drawing of a Weasel by Natalie Walker, to appear in Part 4: Animals

Checklists on the Web

Checklists available online have links in the table below.

The "Checklist" link leads to a basic checklist of each recorded entity and its status within the park.
The "Record List" link shows how this information was derived. (This data can be supplied as a tab-separated text file, suitable for importing into Microsoft Excel and other programs, on request to .)
The purpose of the data is to provide a list of species which have at some time been recorded from Sutton Park. It does not attempt to provide a complete list of original records from the Park, relying in many cases on secondary sources.
The online data is generated more-or-less automatically from the main databases from which the booklets were prepared and is normally updated whenever these are updated, so contains more recent records than the booklets.

The online checklists use various symbols and abbreviations. For an explanation of these, see Key to Symbols and Abbreviations in Checklists.

Plants	Bryophytes (mosses and liverworts)	Checklist	Record List
Plants	Vascular Plants (ferns to flowering plants)	Checklist	Record List
Fungi and Lichens	Fungi (plus Oomycota and Mycetozoa)	Checklist	Record List
Fungi and Lichens	Lichens (lichenized fungi)	Checklist	Record List
Invertebrates	Arachnids (mostly spiders)	Checklist	Record List
	Lepidoptera (butterflies and moths)	Checklist	Record List
	Diptera (true flies)	Checklist	Record List
	Insects other than Lepidoptera and Diptera	Checklist	Record List
	Invertebrates other than those above	Checklist	Record List
Vertebrates	Birds	Checklist	Record List
Vertebrates	Other Vertebrates (fish, amphibians, reptiles, mammals)	Checklist	Record List

Any additional records will be very gratefully received. For my address, see my home page or you can e-mail me via . Species name, group, date and name and address of the recorder are essential; a location within the Park is useful. Any records, however common the species, are useful in order to keep the database up-to-date.


(Above) Drawing of a Wheatear by Vanessa Nixon, from A Natural History of Sutton Park -- Part 3: Birds
(Right) Drawing of the Round-leaved Sundew by Harold Fowkes, from Part 1: Vascular Plants

Booklets

Three booklets in the series A Natural History of Sutton Park are currently available:

Part 1: Vascular Plants
Part 2: Fungi, Lichens and Bryophytes
Part 3: Birds

Each booklet is A5 size, professionally printed with a laminated card cover, and includes:

an introduction to each group described in the booklet
a checklist of species found in Sutton Park, both now and in the past
an index to the checklist(s)
black-and-white illustrations.

The booklets can be bought from the Visitor Centre in Sutton Park. Alternatively, print out the order form and post it to me (the address is on the form).

Talk on Sutton Park

Peter Coxhead is available to talk about Sutton Park -- see his .