Monitoring Dark Bordered Beauty moth at Strensall Common, 1957-1963: some personal recollections

摘要

In 2016 one of us (PJM) was invited to give a talk at the UK moth recorders meeting in Birmingham on 28 January 2017 about the recent work monitoring Dark Bordered Beauty moths Epione vespertaria (Lepidoptera: Geometridae) on Strensall Common near York (see Baker et al., 2016). The Strensall population is thought to be the only surviving population of this moth in England. Just prior to the meeting RBW (VC59, South Lancashire, moth recorder) made contact to relate his own experiences of monitoring this moth at Strensall Common during his teens and early twenties. Subsequent correspondence brought to light some interesting details of the monitoring in those days, which seems to have gone otherwise unmentioned in the published literature. The purposeof the current note is to make these available to subsequent researchers interested in the natural history of the moth and the social history of the people who have monitored it.