What's in the trap? Surveying moths with Essex Wildlife Trust

I'm Stuart Brooker, I'm the Senior Conservation Ecologist at Essex Wildlife Trust. My job is to do biodiversity surveys on our reserves to see how well we are managing our reserves in terms of promoting biodiversity. Tonight we're here at our lovely Abbots Hall Nature Reserve. Tonight we're going to be looking at moths. We're going to be picking out a couple of moth traps and seeing what we can get here down at this kind of salt marshy area of the reserve. So we carry out surveys here once a month throughout the summer months from April to September because moth flight periods are continually changing throughout the year. So each month you might get a different set of species than you did the previous month. By the end of the year you've got a nice big list of species. Tonight we'll be using a moth light trap to attract moths in. This is probably the most common way of attracting moths or surveying moths but there are lots of other ways you can do. Light trapping is probably the most economical and convenient way because moths are attracted to certain wavelengths of light and if we can put that light out into the environment they'll come into our trap and we can hopefully identify what we get. So we're going to go now and set up our traps and see what we can get for tonight and hopefully show you some moths. This trap here is called a skinner trap and this is something that I made myself which I put out in the garden. It's got a low wattage bulb in it which can be run off of a small lead acid battery and that will last all night on that. It's low wattage so it won't have a huge catch but it means the catch will be manageable and you can just leave it out all night in your garden and come back to it in the morning and see what you've got. Other reserves that I do surveys of myself are often in Danbury, local patch, so some of the Danbury Ridge Reserve and Hitchcock Meadows. We also have lots of volunteers that kindly go out to some of our reserves and collect records for us as well. So I can think of one Wealy Hallwood and Brookwood Reserve. They're all collecting really useful information for us from our reserves that we wouldn't get otherwise. You don't need lovely big nature reserves like this in order to survey moths. You can do it in your own back garden and the records that come from there are just as important as anywhere else. If you want to get involved in doing that you might want to learn how to identify moths. You can do that by buying yourself some books. There are others available but I tend to use some of these books. These could be available in some of our nature discovery centres or you can get them online. But there's also lots of other things out there that you can use, lots of websites out there. There's one called UK Moths and lots of counties have their own website. Norfolk Moth Group have a good website with lots of pictures that can help you identify something that you have. It's really important also once you have recorded and identified your species that you then go and put them onto a database and record them somewhere. Because those records are really important to us and to conservation as a whole. There are lots of schemes that you can record these on. The one that I use a lot is the National Moth Recording Scheme. They have a website that you can get an account on and then you can input all of your records that you get. You can also use iRecord, iNaturalist or if you're in Essex you can use Essex Wildlife Trust's Nature Counts. They all speak to each other so if you put a record on one they will generally then go and find their way onto the others.