1. Conservation bodies
There are umpteen conservation groups and societies in the UK, most of which do a splendid job. Those which are well worth recommending for membership, conservation work or merely checking out the wealth of useful information on their websites include the following.

On a local level, the county Wildlife Trusts (each has its own website, the overall one is www.wildlifetrusts.org) remain the most valuable conservation resource of all. Their expert staff manage reserves, carry out extensive research and survey work, maintain biological records, keep an eye on planning applications and development, opposing them where necessary, publish books on local wildlife… I could go on, but if you live in the UK you should be a member already so with luck there's no need.

The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds www.rspb.org.uk is by far the best-supported operation with more than a million members, many exceptional reserves and a holistic approach to conservation while focussing mainly on our feathered friends.

The Wildfowl and Wetland Trust www.wwt.org.uk and the Woodland Trust www.woodland-trust.org.uk apply the same holistic principles and boast superb reserves, as does the National Trust www.nationaltrust.org.uk on a somewhat grander scale – the NT sensibly sees wildlife conservation and building conservation as part of the same scheme of things.

The British Trust for Ornithology www.bto.org and Marine Conservation Society www.mcsuk.org are at the sharp end of research, and the Campaign to Protect Rural England www.cpre.org.uk is always at the forefront of the struggle to defend what we have, and try and regain some of the lost ground.

Among other things, the BTO organises and co-ordinates bird ringing by around 2,000 licensed voluntary practitioners in Britain and Ireland, dealing with getting on for a million birds each year. On average only one in every 50 birds ringed are subsequently found and reported, but this still helps provide valuable information about such matters as movements and longevity. A male Reed Bunting, a species of high conservation concern, is shown alongside with a ring on his right leg.

Three specialist organisations concentrating on invertebrates deserve a round of applause or, even better, an annual cheque for membership – Butterfly Conservation www.butterfly-conservation.org, the British Dragonfly Society www.dragonflysoc.org.uk and the Bees, Wasps and Ants Recording Scheme BWARS, www.bwars.com. Linked with BWARS is Hymettus Ltd www.hymettus.org.uk, a charity which is the principal source of advice on the conservation of bees, wasps and ants in Great Britain and Ireland, focussing particularly on research into vulnerable aculeates. Their website is excellent, especially the downloadable information sheets on species. The campaigning organisation Buglife www.buglife.org.uk, plus Plantlife www.plantlife.org.uk , the Mammals Trust www.mtuk.org and the Mammal Society www.mammal.org.uk, also do sterling work. The publications of the last-named are first rate, while Buglife's efforts to protect the Thurrock Marshes from development have been estimable.

On the general campaigning front, internationally as well as at home, Friends of the Earth www.foe.co.uk and Greenpeace www.greenpeace.org remain very potent forces for putting pressure on Government and business to behave with environmental and social responsibility. Publicly-funded organisations which seem to be facing an uphill struggle in the good work they do are the Environment Agency www.environment-agency.gov.uk, whose website boasts a vast amount of information, and English Nature, which has now been subsumed in Natural England www.naturalengland.org.uk (see below). Defra www.defra.gov.uk and the Joint Nature Conservation Committee www.jncc.gov.uk also have considerable amounts of data accessible on the internet.

From the start of 2006 English Nature was in the process of linking with the Landscape, Access and Recreation section of the Countryside Agency and Defra's Rural Development Service in a new organisation entitled Natural England, which was launched in October that year.

Whether this will be an improvement remains to be seen – duplication of activities is rarely sensible or beneficial, but avoiding this by lumping three organisations together to make a behemoth is not necessarily a step in the right direction. Moreover, a decision by Government to cut funding for Natural England by £27 million before the organisation had even been created, with even more drastic cuts suggested late in 2007, have hardly boded well.

2. Publications and references
If you purchase only one magazine, make it British Wildlife www.britishwildlife.com on subscription – the publication covers a tremendous amount of ground in an authoritative manner, and the conservation updates are invaluable.

References for individual species or groups as well as habitats are bewildering in their number but there is usually something available, to which end the internet is exceptionally useful.

The best bets in the UK for books are Pemberley Books www.pembooks.demon.co.uk, NHBS www.nhbs.co.uk and Subbuteo www.wildlifebooks.com. A number of German and Dutch outlets are not only supremely efficient but also very competitively priced and can be cheaper on postage than some in the UK. Recommended without hesitation are www.insecta.de and www.euronet.nl/users/backhuys as is www.abebooks.com for finding second-hand books anywhere in the world.

On habitats, the New Naturalist series from Collins has splendid volumes (sometimes very pricy on the second-hand market) concerning heathland, hedges, woodland, seashore, churchyards and others. These, along with titles focused on individual groups of flora and fauna, notably Amphibians and Reptiles by Trevor Beebee and Richard Griffiths, retain some or all their validity despite in many instances being published decades ago.

For mushrooms you can rely on the stylish, disciplined volume of that title by Roger Phillips (published by Pan). For flora generally Wild Flowers of Britain and Ireland by Marjorie Blamey, Richard Fitter and Alastair Fitter (A. and C. Black www.acblack.com) is the perfect pocket field guide, though you need a fair-sized pocket. Flora Britannica by Richard Mabey (Sinclair-Stevenson) is another must, and a slim tome by Roger Phillips again on coastal flora is well worth having if you're trudging across dune or shingle.

The best key and guide to birds remains the Birds of the Western Palearctic, published by Oxford University Press www.oup.co.uk and available on disc. Bird Watching magazine www.birdwatching.co.uk and the RSPB magazine are handy for updates, since much of the information on the discs is a few years old.

Simon Holloway's Breeding Birds in Britain and Ireland 1875-1900 contains abundant (and often depressing) historical information, while the EBCC Atlas of European Breeding Birds puts the British details in wider present perspective. Both books are published by T. and A. D. Poyser, whose full list, along with that of Helm on individual species, is impressive – both now come under the A. and C. Black umbrella.

For mammals, Professor David Macdonald's Field Guide to the Mammals of Britain & Europe (Collins) is an admirable key. Badgers are comprehensively covered in Ernest Neal and Chris Cheeseman's book published by Poyser, while Whittet's www.whittetbooks.com books on Urban Foxes by Stephen Harris and Phil Baker and Hedgehogs by Pat Morris are a cracking read.

Also worth noting are the Mammal Society's booklets on American Mink by Johnny Birks, Water Vole (Gordon Woodroffe), Woodmice (John Flowerdew) and Shrews (Sara Churchfield).

Invertebrates are the hardest group of animals to identify in the field. Butterflies and dragonflies are relatively easy, though even there a close-up inspection is necessary to distinguish, say, the Essex Skipper from the Small Skipper, or the Azure damselfly from the Common Blue damselfly.

With flies, wasps, bees, beetles, snails and so on the job is a lot harder, but there are aids, not least the website of one of the best photographers of invertebrates in Britain, David Element (www.david.element.ukgateway.net), who not only takes splendid images but has all the species accurately identified, a remarkable achievement.

Other websites of value include www.chrysis.net, which concentrates on ruby-tail wasps.

As regards books, despite being sizeable such general volumes as those by Michael Chinery published by Collins can cover only a small amount of the ground but they are still worth packing in the rucksack.

The same goes for any of the Naturalists' Handbook series from Richmond Publishing. These are accurate, handy and readable, unlike some of the strictly scientific keys which are necessary for experts but not for the non-specialist, who would require them as bedtime reading only if suffering from insomnia. The Naturalists' Handbook series is as follows: Insects on nettles, B. N. K. Davis; Grasshoppers, Valerie K. Brown; Solitary wasps, Peter F. Yeo and Sarah A. Corbet; Insects and thistles, Margaret Redfern; Hoverflies, Francis S. Gilbert; Bumblebees, Oliver E. Prys-Jones and Sarah A. Corbet; Dragonflies, Peter L. Miller; Common ground beetles, Trevor G. Forsythe; Animals on seaweed, Peter J. Hayward; Ladybirds, Michael Majerus and Peter Kearns; Aphid predators, Graham E. Rotheray; Animals on the surface film, Marjorie Guthrie; Mayflies, Janet Harker; Mosquitoes, Keith R. Snow; Insects, plants and microclimate, D. M. Unwin and Sarah A. Corbet; Weevils, M. G. Morris; Plant galls, Margaret Redfern and R. R. Askew; Insects on cabbages and oilseed rape, William D. J. Kirk; Pollution monitoring with lichens, D. H. S. Richardson; Microscopic life in sphagnum, Marjorie Hingley; Animals of sandy shores, Peter J. Hayward; Animals under logs and stones, C. Philip Wheater and Helen J. Read; Blowflies, Zakaria Erinlioglu; Ants, Gary J. Skinner and Geoffrey W. Allen; Thrips, William D. J. Kirk; Insects on dock plants, David T. Salt and B. Whittaker; Insects on cherry trees, Simon R. Leather and Keith P. Bland; Studying invertebrates, C. Philip Wheater and Penny A. Cook.

Although by definition geographically limited, the admirable ongoing series of atlases produced by Surrey Wildlife Trust www.surreywildlifetrust.co.uk and covering to the end of 2008 Amphibians and Reptiles, Ants, Bees, Butterflies, Dragonflies, Grasshoppers and Crickets, Hoverflies, Ladybirds, Larger Moths, Shieldbugs and Water Beetles, has a much wider application.

The atlases, compiled by such experts as David W. Baldock, Graham A. Collins, Dr Jonty Denton, Roger D. Hawkins, Roger K. A. Morris and Julia Wycherley and Richard Anstis, cover the vast majority, and in some cases all, the species in lowland England in a readable but scientific manner. With a high proportion of the images provided by David Element, and in the case of Bees of Surrey (2008) by me, these books are first class across the board.

The Land Snails of Britain and North-west Europe by M.P. Kerney and R. A. D. Cameron (Collins) deals with that group perfectly.

For butterflies, two books are sufficient – Millennium Atlas of Butterflies
in Britain and Ireland (OUP) and The Butterflies of Britain & Ireland by Jeremy Thomas and Richard Lewington (Dorling Kindersley).

For moths, A Field Guide to the Moths of Great Britain and Ireland by Paul Waring, Martin Townsend and Richard Lewington (British Wildlife Publishing) is first rate. The State of Britain's Larger Moths 2006, available from Butterfly Conservation, is important but depressing reading.

For dragonflies, Philip Corbet's magnum opus Dragonflies: Behaviour and Ecology of Odonata (Harley Books) is outstanding used in conjunction with Steve Brooks's Field Guide to the Dragonflies and Damselflies of Great Britain and Ireland illustrated by Richard Lewington and published by British Wildlife Publishing.

Bees are not that well covered at the moment but the pocket Field Guide to the Bumblebees of Great Britain and Ireland by Mike Edwards and Martin Jenner, published by Ocelli Ltd, is a step in the right direction.

The best keys to wasps are provided by the Royal Entomological Society as follows, but unless you are strictly scientific with a microscope and ready to catch, kill, dissect and store species, they are of questionable assistance.

The most useful are Spider Wasps (Pompilidae) by M.C. Day, Scolioidea, Vespoidea and Sphecoidea by O.W. Richards, and Cuckoo-Wasps (Chrysididae) by D. Morgan.

British Hymenoptera Aculeata by Edward Saunders (L. Reeve & Co) is over a century old and contains misidentifications, but much of the information about individual species is valid and the illustrations, though not comprehensive, can be helpful especially on bees.

There is also a wealth of information in the Red Data Book on Insects published by the Nature Conservancy Council (precursor of English Nature) in 1987, and the same organisation's Review of the scarce and threatened bees, wasps and ants of Great Britain by Steven Falk 1991.

Sphecidae are pretty well dealt with, and the best book covering identification and habits is O. Lomholdt's marvellous two-volume work The Sphecidae (Hymenoptera) of Fennoscandia and Denmark published by the Scandinavian Science Press Ltd. It is in English, which is a bonus.

Kevin M. O'Neill's work Solitary Wasps (Cornell University Press) covers mainly North American species, but the numerous detailed accounts of biology and behaviour hold good for species everywhere.

Not in English, but with many superb images as well as authoritative text, is Die Grabwespen Deutschlands by Manfred Blosch, published by Goecke und Evers. Wespen by Rolf Witt (Narturbuch Verlag) also has a lot of photos and short, sharp, accurate text. Bienen, Wespen, Ameisen by Heiko Bellmann is well illustrated.

De Wespen en Mieren van Nederland, from a team led by T. M. J. Peeters, is great if you read Dutch, and has valuable information even you don't, notably detailed flight periods, maps and lists of prey species. What happens in Holland might happen here, and species there may well colonise Britain so it is worth looking at this book.

BWARS publishes a monograph on Potter and Mason Wasps by Michael E. Archer and that organisation is also behind the ongoing series of Provisional atlases of the aculeate Hymenoptera of Britain and Ireland, with their excellent comments and maps on individual species.

To the end of 2006 five atlases had been published by the Biological Records Centre of the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology at Monks Wood, with 285 species out of a tally of 641 mapped, so there is a long way to go.

The Biological Records Centre can be accessed at www.brc.ac.uk and has 13 million records of 12,000 land and freshwater species. The CEH has an astonishing range of environmental disciplines and has always been at the cutting edge of accurate, scientific research as well as record-keeping, focusing in particular on the impacts of human activity on natural environments.

That is more important then ever now, you might think, but apparently not, since disgracefully and short-sightedly early in 2006 the National Environment Research Council, in a shabby denial of its title, decided to close three CEH centres and redeploy a third of the 600 staff or make them redundant.

The impact of this is likely to be disastrous, but despite being opposed by 98 per cent of the 1,325 people across the country who commented on the ‘business plan', by the Conservative and Liberal Democratic Parties, and by proper environmental organisations (which the NERC has proved clearly it is not), the cutbacks were approved.

The thinking, if one can dignify it with such a description, behind the proposal was that the CEH was losing money each year, in part through not succeeding in selling its expertise to the required level. The cost-cutting exercise apparently will cost £43 million, enough to keep the CEH going in its unreformed style for quite a while. These are the economics of the madhouse, involving an act of environmental vandalism by an organisation with the environment theoretically as its raison d'etre.

Besides that, quite why such vital research work has to be viewed from a financial debit-credit standpoint is inexplicable – certain activities funded by the taxpayer should never be considered in this way since it misses the point. Defence is one; lower down the financial scale, the CEH is another.

Grasshoppers and crickets are dealt with in the Surrey Wildlife Trust atlas by David W. Baldock, Grasshoppers and Allied Insects of Great Britain and Ireland by Judith A. Marshall and E. C. M. Hales (Harley Books), and A Field Guide to the Grasshoppers and Crickets of Britain and Northern Europe by Heiko Bellmann (Collins).

Hoverflies are admirably covered in British Hoverflies by Alan Stubbs and Steven Falk (BENHS), and together with Martin Drake, Stubbs is also responsible for the same publisher's book British Soldierflies and their Allies.

For beetles, the Field Guide in Colour to Beetles by K.W. Harde (Blitz Editions) deals with a large selection of an enormous group.

The most entertaining book on spiders, with a mass of information and photos, is still Dick Jones's Spiders of Britain and Northern Europe published by Country Life. This book is long out of print and may not be ideal for purists, but frankly purists often lose sight of what needs to be done for invertebrates.

In this area, rule one (and probably rules two and three as well) is as follows: get members of the public interested in the fascinating behaviour of these little critters before spending your time speaking Latin at them and checking how many spines one species happens to have on its legs compared with another.

Obviously not all experts can or indeed should do this, since precise, disciplined scientific study is essential for understanding the natural world and consequently for conservation. But it is possible to mix science with fun and wonder, so perhaps a few more aficionados who have the common touch might be advised occasionally to substitute a passionate approach for a dispassionate one.

Simply, if people are not won over to invertebrates which, when they get any kind of press, tend to get a bad one, identifying species will become merely a record of what's gone rather than an exultation in what's there.

In so far as I tend not to take specimens and am not a ‘twitcher', determined to tick as many species as possible on a site, my methods are not strictly scientific. For instance, once I have positively identified a species of wasp or bee in its habitat, I prefer to spend time studying and photographing what it and its neighbours do, sometimes discovering aspects of behaviour which might not have been reported elsewhere.

In one sense this approach may not be entirely professional, but in another, surely it is. Above all, it seems worthwhile as a starting point in attempting to make natural history potentially interesting for everyone, especially the young.

Any inquiries – please e-mail me at Nature Conservation Imaging.

Images © Jeremy Early. All rights reserved.