Preventing recaptures (1 Viewer)

I'm trying to trap every night this year that I can and at the moment I take the previous night's catch to the front garden so that hopefully they'll not be retrapped the next night. Through necessity my 125 MV Robinson is positioned on decking next to a slatted wooden fence, this is to prevent nuisance to my neighbours. This creates many places for moths to hide. These moths obviously can't be relocated in the front garden. At the moment my solution to this is not turning the trap on until about an hour after dusk hoping that the moths will have dispersed by then. Another solution I have thought of is running an actinic trap on alternate nights which can be positioned on the lawn nearer the house.

Any thoughts on this?

Nick

I recall talking about this to a friend who runs a number of MV traps every night. He participated in an experiment where he marked a number of moths with a dab of paint prior to release, and then recorded retraps on subsequent nights. I believe he had very few.

I wouldn't bother too much about retraps either. Any that are will be balanced by moths that are attracted to the light but escape before you get there. Just release the catch as far as possible from the trap and in dense vegetation. I would favour setting the trap just before dusk - otherwise you may miss some of the early fliers entirely.
Martin

Over here I run the trap nightly and I rarely get obvious retraps - there are a few exceptions for example I have one battered male Lymantra lunata that insists on coming to the trap each night, despite being released as far away as 500m from my house (walked him to the school crossing wth the boys before releasing him in a dense bush) - the species composition varies every night and the potential for retraps is relatively slight as on decent nights there might only be 10% of the species being the same, if that makes sense