​1710 species presented

On 13th June, I stopped by the Elveden War Memorial on the A11 on my way to Sutton Fen for a trapping session with Ben (warden at Sutton Fen and my son). The trapping session itself did not produce any new species for the website, but I found Grey Carpet near the memorial and was able to photograph Scarce Vapourer at Sutton Fen. The amazing story of how Mick A'Court (assistant warden at Sutton Fen) reared the latter is described on the page for the species.

Dissections from the trip to Covert Woods on 9th June have added a further 2 species (so far)

Another Phyllonorycter sent to me for gen det (by Andrew Raybould) was P.hostis. This came to the NIG (Cydia NIGricana) pheromone lure - one of three very similar Phyllonorycters to come to this lure.

Site updated with previously overlooked species new to Britain and taxonomic revisions from the first 5 updates to the British Checklist published in the Entomologist's Record. This has resulted in Matthew's Wainscot being assimilated in Common Wainscot and so one fewer species for the website. 

​In my review (Blog March 2014) of the RES Checklist, following its first publication, I commented on the difficulty faced by any log number based checklist in its handling of taxonomic revision. It is notable, following revision of the genus Agrochola, that the authors of the checklist favour maintaining log number order to the extent that they split the two subgenera of Anchoscelis on either side of Litoligia.

I have also been in communication with Bob Heckford over the lack of any update to the whole list. The list is supposed to be maintained at the Angela Marmont Centre and in theory the 2016 version is downloadable from there (though I have never succeeded in actually downloading it). The authors of the checklist are (apparently) not responsible for maintaining this list. So in order to have an updated checklist one needs to transcribe the 2013 list and then update it with each of the 5 updates. This was quite a significant undertaking. I have now done it and have made it available on this blog and on the Home menu. It is available free-of-charge, but I would suggest that a small donation towards the maintenance of this site would be reasonable.

Finding the Cryptic Fern caused me to review my Fern records with the discovery that 2 specimens from Ham Fen in Kent in 2010, which had been presented as Fern, are actually Cryptic Fern. The Fern page has consequently been re-written.

An early spring trip to Scotland was successful in finding most of our target species

1664 Species presented

Also Mick Scott (Longstones, St Marys, IOS) gave me a moth to identify, which turns out to be a first for Britain. Full details of this will appear in an article in Atropos in due course. I have not added it to this site yet. The correct genus that this species belongs in is subject to debate; hopefully we will resolve this before publication. 

A couple of years ago I started a revision of the Family: Coleophoridae
This work has now been completed as far as I can currently take it - but it will be updated as new material becomes available.
The revision has resulted in two species being removed.
37.008 Coleophora adjectella removed - identification uncertain
​37.084 Coleophora sternipennella removed - misidentification
The revised work is published on a separate website dedicated to this family: British Coleophora
All the (completely revised) Coleophora keys and ID features have been moved to the new site.
The family front page and most of the images previously available on the British Lepidoptera site remain here.

Also in 2020 I made an appeal for donations in order to upgrade the British Lepidoptera site to provide Weebly's search box. This appeal met with very limited success - probably sufficient to cover the upgrade costs for 6 months only. I do not want to clutter the site with commercial sponsors logos and I would like to keep the site open to all rather than making it subscription only. So I am making another appeal for private sponsors - if this site has helped you with your identifications please make a small donation.