Pan-Species Listing: How to Become a Super-Naturalist is about a method to record your natural history sightings over a lifetime, looking at and recording all taxa, from birds to plants to invertebrates to fungi and everything in between, treating them all with equal value.

In the book, Graeme Lyons attempts to cover every aspect of pan-species listing, introducing the concept and its history, before going through all taxonomic groups.This is in itself a monumental task, as each group gets their own run-down, a difficulty level, and a bibliography of useful texts, websites and Facebooks to tackle their identification. This alone makes the book a useful reference guide for those identifying invertebrates.

Graeme also writes about his approach to fieldwork, itself a great guide to being a field naturalist, before turning to some broader ideas affecting the pan-species listing community, including demographics and neurodivergence. I found those sections particularly interesting, with Graeme doing a commendable job of sharing those voices which are still poorly represented in natural history, and the reasons why that might be and, in the case of neurodivergence, using his own experiences. It would have been an easy topic to avoid, but writing about who records wildlife and why they do it adds an extra human dimension to the book.

Some find the listing element to be mercenary or even distasteful. Graeme does such a great job of sharing his enthusiasm to this approach, and also the value to biological recording, that I think most natural historians will find something of value in the pan-species listing approach, if not become a convert!

One of the very few downsides may be the price point. While I believe you will get £39.99 worth of information from the book, to many this can feel like too much for a book of this sort, with a few people who I have recommended the book to having balked at the price. Hopefully this will come down in future editions!

Overall, this is a great book for those who are fascinated by all wildlife, whether you are just starting to expand away from birds, or already experienced with multiple taxa.

Reviewed by

Robert Jaques