Your Records!

This is just a gentle reminder that, if you haven't already done so, now is the time to send your moth records for 2013 to your County Moth Recorder:

VC22 Berks  Martin Harvey  (kitenetter@googlemail.com)
VC23 Oxon  Martin Townsend  (martin.townsend4@ntlworld.com)
VC24 Bucks  Martin Albertini  (malbertini@onetel.com)

With the National Moth Recording Scheme now fully up and running, Butterfly Conservation (in conjunction with MothsIreland) intends to produce a printed atlas covering all of the macro-moths of Great Britain and Ireland.  The plan is for this to appear towards the end of 2018 using data collected up to and including 2016.  The timescale therefore gives us another three years in which to try and improve our knowledge of moth species in under-recorded areas of the three counties.

The map below is for VC24 Bucks and shows the number of macro-moth species known from each 10km square at the beginning of 2013.  The totals will no doubt have changed slightly when all of last year's records have been processed but the map is still a useful indicator of under-recorded squares and gives an idea of those which we should be targetting over the next three years.  Those with 400 or more species are well covered already but there is plenty of scope for improvement in those which have fewer than that number.  Highlighted in yellow is SP82 (including Whitchurch, Wing, Stoke Hammond and Mursley) which is desperately in need of some trapping!  Dave Wilton