NORTH DOWNS & BEYOND

For those of you who do not have a Facebook account. I placed a link to yesterday's post on the 'Pan-species Listers' Facebook Group and asked for members opinions to collecting and killing specimens. There were many replies, and here are just a few...   Chris Raper   Depends entirely on personal preference AND on how much you want to know the name of something (as opposed to having a rough idea what it might be). Obviously many distinctive species are easy to ID in the field or alive in a net/tube but more are impossible to identify without taking a specimen. Digital photography can only go so far because often the bits you need to see are not shown in a photo (genitalia etc) or the insect flew off before you could get that all-important shot of the middle leg. Where I get a bit hot under the collar is when (rarely) someone who doesn't want to take specimens starts to send in records for things that can only be identified to a sufficient level with...

Chequered Skipper - the only one that I have seen. NOT collected A museum glass cabinet that displays stuffed birds is an object that at once shows its age. When the naturalists of the 18th and 19th centuries went out to catalogue the natural world, they went armed with guns, cat gut and sawdust. The provenance of a bird was down to the production of its skin - the old saying of 'what's hit is history, what's missed is mystery' was very true indeed - if you didn't have the body then the record was unproven. There cannot be many people who would not baulk at the idea of netting birds, wringing their necks and then displaying them at home, stuffed and wired to a perch within a case. But what about butterflies? Moths? Beetles? I have recently had an email correspondence on the rights and wrongs of collecting with two fellow naturalists. I think it fair to say that one is pro and one against. I find myself sitting somewhere in the middle. It got me thinking abo...