Record keeper

Although I have much enjoyed prattling away here since 11 June 2008, when I introduced the blog with the headline Moths of the world, rejoice!, I have always been conscious of a glaring deficiency. The highlights from my trap are publicly recorded for as long as Blogger's endless, free generosity with web space permits, but they are not in a form which is easily accessible to experts whose data is the bedrock of our knowledge about the natural world.

Until now! Thanks to another wonderfully generous gift of time and energy, my tally since we moved to Oxfordshire in April 2013 has been added to the information bank at the Thames Valley Environmental Records Centre from which it makes its way into the UK's national moth recording scheme and other banks of data.

This came about after I contacted TVERC on completion of my extremely amateur summary list which is available on this blog if you click on the button in the crossbar below the big photo compilation on the main page which says: WHAT MOTH IS THAT? My records. 

Scroll down the alphabetical photos of moths which have visited and you come to this, below. The moths are all there but it would take hours for a researcher to pick out the ones which she or he is looking for.

Now - pause for fanfare - thanks to the labours of a fellow moth enthusiast in Oxfordshire, Nick Barber, the entire list can be accessed using all the cleverness of computers from a spreadsheet at TVERC which looks like this:

Not the sort of thing that you would buy at a station bookstall, admittedly, but absolutely invaluable scientifically and in terms of giving this blog a purpose apart from pleasure for myself and a few others, and a modest role in spreading interest in our shy but fascinating subjects.

So, step forward, Nick, for an immensely well-deserved accolade! The work has been quite something; Nick was first in touch on April 6th when he introduced himself as the 'lucky volunteer with the task of transcribing your historical moth records.' An email a month later, after we had exchanged info about this year's catches in our respective traps, announced that he was on Page 21 of 27 in my historical list. Lucky? Well, Nick, I am very glad that you see it that way.

And where did his interest in moths come from? His mother's encouragement, fortified by I-Spy books, led to a boyhood of bird and butterfly watching, botanising, pond-dipping and raising caterpillars, first in Surrey and then in south-east Lancashire. This mirrors my own experience in Leeds and on holidays a little further afield; and we share another tremendous bonus: in later life,  the problem of actually finding moths was revolutionised by our wives. They each gave us a moth trap as a birthday present. This had been my dream since the age of ten or so, when I leafed through my Watkins & Doncaster catalogue of entomological equipment and whistled in awe at how much a light trap cost. Since I breathlessly unwrapped mine on May 18th 2004 (a full four years before my sons directed me to blogging), it has been an unflagging source of wonder and delight. Plus I now know so much about eggboxes.

So, thanks again Nick - and as Big Chief I-Spy used to say in his code which I hope you remember: Odhu ntingo!

Meanwhile, my own work is far from done. Although my mind may be uselessly disordered, I have always kept an amateur list. Here below is a composite picture of my pre-blog moths whose details are gathering dust on a ringbound file with the cunningly Steinbeckish title Of Moths and Men which I later transferred to this blog's header. (I apologise to women, who are of course included, that I haven't yet thought of a snappy way of incorporating them; especially when you think of their role in giving inspired birthday presents).

So now I must either grit my teeth and start to digitise, if that is the right word, all this scrawl or find an equivalent of Nick in Yorkshire. Maybe lockdown will go on long enough...   As for the future, I am now a diligent daily contributor to the wonderfully idiot-friendly iRecord app and website whose regular automated notes that there are no records of all sorts of moth species within 10km of my home, show how important it is to keep an ordered log alongside the simple enjoyment of blogging.