A Natural History of Sutton Park
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) were engaged on a project to document the natural history of Sutton Park. Three booklets were published through the under the general title A Natural History of Sutton Park. The intended fourth booklet was never published in printed form.
Much of the work consisted of collating existing records, particularly those held by the Biological Records Centre, Warwick Museum. Many other people 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). Professional surveys of invertebrates were carried out in 1996-1998 by Steven Falk and Steven Lane and in 2018-2019 by Steven Falk and Chris Kirby-Lambert.
Records are now put online and are regularly updated (see below for links to checklists on the web). The text part of the booklets is also being put online.
Submit a record. Drawing of a Weasel by Natalie Walker |
Checklists on the Web
Checklists available online have links in the table below.
- The "Checklist and Records" link leads to a checklist of species (or other recording units, such as subspecies) showing their status within the park. Use the button labelled "Show records" to show the individual records used in preparing the checklist. (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 separate databases and is normally updated whenever these are updated, so contains more recent records than the now out-of-date printed booklets.
The online checklists may use various symbols and abbreviations. For an explanation of these, see Key to Symbols and Abbreviations in Checklists.
(If you have used the checklists before, note that now there is only one web page for each group, with a button that toggles between hiding and showing the records for each species or other recording unit.)
| Fungi and Lichens | Fungi (plus Oomycota and Mycetozoa) | Checklist and Records | Part 2 text |
| Lichens (lichenized fungi) | Checklist and Records | ||
| Plants | Bryophytes (mosses and liverworts) | Checklist and Records | |
| Vascular Plants (ferns to flowering plants) | Checklist and Records | Part 1 text | |
| Invertebrates | Arachnids (mostly spiders) | Checklist and Records | Part 4 |
| Coleoptera (beetles) | Checklist and Records | ||
| Lepidoptera (butterflies and moths) | Checklist and Records | ||
| Diptera (true flies) | Checklist and Records | ||
| Insects other than Coleoptera, Lepidoptera and Diptera | Checklist and Records | ||
| Invertebrates other than those above | Checklist and Records | ||
| Vertebrates | Vertebrates other than birds (fish, amphibians, reptiles, mammals) | Checklist and Records | |
| Birds | Checklist and Records | Part 3 |
Any additional records will be
very gratefully received. 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.
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(Above) Drawing of a Wheatear by Vanessa Nixon, from
A Natural History of Sutton Park – Part 3: Birds |
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(Right) Drawing of the Round-leaved Sundew by Harold Fowkes, from Part 1: Vascular Plants |
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Booklets
Three booklets in the series A Natural History of Sutton Park were published. They are somewhat out of date now. The checklists online are more recent and are updated from time to time.
Slightly updated versions of the text part of the booklets are being made available
online in PDF form.
Both versions are designed to be printed back-to-back (duplex) on A4 paper.
The "large" versions linked below can also be read on-screen.
The "booklet" versions can be folded to make an A5 booklet.
| Date of last printed edition | Revised online text – designed to print duplex | |
| Part 1: Vascular Plants | 1997 | Large, booklet |
| Part 2: Fungi, Lichens and Bryophytes | 1993 | Large, booklet |
| Part 3: Birds | 1995 | not yet available |
| Part 4: Animals | – | not yet available |
If you do want a paper copy of the original booklet, they are still available at a reduced price plus the cost of post and packing. Each booklet is A5 size, professionally printed with a laminated card cover, and includes:
- an introduction to each group described in the booklet
- black-and-white illustrations
- checklist(s) of species found in Sutton Park – now superseded by the online version
- an index to the checklist(s).
Print out the order form and post it to me (the address is on the form).
Bioblitzes
Bioblitz events are held in Sutton Park every year, usually involving schoolchildren on a Friday and the public on the following Saturday. Records from these events are added to the checklists linked above. Some further information and images can be found at the links below.
Talk on Sutton Park
Peter Coxhead is available to talk about Sutton Park -- see his .
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| Content last updated: | 6 Feb 2022 |