Most of the animals in any given wood are not visible, and the ones that are visible are the ones that do not mind being seen. So how do you count the rest?
This week I spent two mornings with a survey team doing it the unglamorous way: soil pits, leaf litter sieving, and a lot of kneeling. The tally from four square metres of woodland floor ran to [number] invertebrate species, several of which the surveyor could not identify in the field.
The point of the kneeling
Because the baseline is missing. We have good long-term records for birds and butterflies, because people enjoy watching them. For everything that lives in the leaf litter, the record is thin, and you cannot detect a decline in something you never counted.
If you want to help and you have a garden, the cheapest contribution is a pitfall trap and a notebook. Same method, same date, every week.