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Southern Migrant Hawker (1 Viewer)

Just one point on all this. Many entomologists carry a net when out and about, myself included. It doesn't mean we're killing the insects. Dragonflies are large, robust insects that can be easily handled - and catching them for display to the public is the best way of getting the public enthused about them (and their protection). I regularly lead walks, net in hand to get people involved. So if you see a chap wandering around with a net, don't assume the worst - I'd hate to get thumped by a big burly birder!
 

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I recall being told of a Mr Harry Eales taking a clouded yellow locally why? This and other rare species are not seen very often and when they are taken it prevents others from enjoying the sight. If a collector for a museum needs specimens they can be bought from overseas (where they are more common) through the internet. Photograph evidence is good enough for British Dragonfly Society and Butterfly Conservation for records. We don't live in Victorian times where Flauna and Flora where destroyed mainly for vanity.
I agree about photographers leaving more than footprints on fragile sites e.g A68 spb, but i think this is a small number of people who don't have an understanding of Natural History.
P.S. the S.P.B have done very well again this year.
 
Hello JA,

I also agree it's time to call it a day with this thread. Perhaps I am from the old school of entomologists, after all I'm pushing 70 years of age. I doubt if anyone will change my opinions or I theirs.

I came directly into entomology rather then come in from another nature interest source. Today many come in from Botany and of course ornithology and I think that it your grounding in your first choice of subject that forms the basis of held opinions. Entomologists and Botanists tend look upon their subjects from more of a scientific viewpoint than apparently do ornithologists.

I know one very good naturalist who started out as a birder, and became a rabid twitcher, he would drive 500 miles at the drop of a hat at the mere sniff of a rare bird. When he came into looking at butterflies and dragonflies he was immensely proud of having seen all the resident British breeding species of both Insect Orders in just two years. He couldn't understand why I didn't go flying all over Britain ticking them off in my books. I merely told him I wasn't interested. My interest is in what species occur and where, in the two most northerly counties in England on the east coast. I've spent over half a century doing this and I'm far from finished, in retrospect I bit off too much, I should have just covered one county and could have done it more efficiently. The 2,000 sq miles area of Northumberland is probably more than enough for anyone.

The changes I have seen in 50 years has been amazing, I wonder how many people would take up any aspect of nature study if they had to go back to the days before computers and the internet, when records were made only in a notebook and communication between other enthusiasts was not by long distance phone call, but a note to a quarterly entomological journal. Most of the entomologists I have knew in my early years were all collectors, many like myself bred inumerable insects, it's from people like us that the books that are published today have a good deal of accurate information in them, unlike some of the Victorian books that I had to use.

I have had one twitch (birds) A Great Auk adult and a juvenile and a great Auk egg. I'll let you guess where I saw them.

Harry
That would be M.H.
 
I recall being told of a Mr Harry Eales taking a clouded yellow locally why? This and other rare species are not seen very often and when they are taken it prevents others from enjoying the sight. If a collector for a museum needs specimens they can be bought from overseas (where they are more common) through the internet. Photograph evidence is good enough for British Dragonfly Society and Butterfly Conservation for records. We don't live in Victorian times where Flauna and Flora where destroyed mainly for vanity.
I agree about photographers leaving more than footprints on fragile sites e.g A68 spb, but i think this is a small number of people who don't have an understanding of Natural History.
P.S. the S.P.B have done very well again this year.

Michael,

Some twelve years ago I did take a Clouded Yellow in Northumberland, I bred some twenty eight specimens from it, twenty six of which were released back into the wild.

Whilst this species doesn't often reach this county, observers would have had a far better chance of seeing one of the twenty six specimens than the original one.

Moth trappers cause the deaths of hundreds of specimens a year, most of the specimens that alight in the vicinity of the trap are eaten by birds in the very early morning, and many that enter the traps can also be taken by small birds i.e. Tits and Robins not to mention wasps that enter the trap and cut up moths to take back to their nest to feed their larva. The trapper may release all he catches, but the very presence and operation of the trap is fatal to many insects. You could of course argue that that is natural predation, but, you could also say that without the presence of the trap many of those eaten would have survived, if only for a few days or a week or two.

Operators of the Rothamstead Moth Trap, (if they use the trap according to the instructions), kill tens of thousands of insects every year, because every one entering the trap is killed. Other Insect Orders attracted to light include Hymenoptera, Neuroptera, Coleoptera, Hemiptera and Diptera.

These 'mass killers' are operated in the same place, every night of the year, year after year, just to provide population statistics. Now it seems to me, that the basic premise here is flawed. If you continue to trap day after day, year after year and decade after decade you will reduce the local breeding moth population considerably. In the case of rare or very local species, the trap operator could come close too, or possibly the extermination of that species in his area. One Rothamstrad Trap kills more specimens in a week in mid summer, than I have done in an entire lifetime.

I'm not trying to justify my own limited collecting here, just pointing out it's simply miniscule compared to the numbers of insects killed by indiscriminate trapping.

Photography may be a modern method of recording, but it's not perfect and unless critical points of many insect species are clearly defined in the picture(s) in many cased the specimen cannot be identified. Camera's today that are digital and have all the bells, knobs and whistles on them are all very fine, but you try getting a good photograph of an insect using the equipment used fifty or more years ago when I started. It would cost a small fortune in film and developement costs for every black and white picture worth preserving. Colour film was available but very expensive as was the processing.

Most 'good' photographs of the period were taken in photographic studio's with the insect partially anaethsitised and posed. Photography simply wasn't a viable method of recording in my youth.

The SP-b Frit sites near the A68 were first discovered by collectors in the 1930's, one of the sites have been given limited protecion by being a Durham Wildlife Trust Site, yet for the last five years I have been there, the vegetation has been damaged by trampling every one of those years. It got so bad that the wardens put up signs on the site, and in the local Butterfly Conservation website asking people not to walk over the site. Given that 3/4 of the Durham SP-b site area was destroyed in one week by a farmer ploughing out the largest site and liming the land, effectively destroying the largest of all the known sites, it is imperative that people are educated not to trample over sites, sadly few think that such measures applies to them.

In reply to your second 'post', the specimens are in the Hancock Museum (Now renamed the Great North Museum). These three specimens were taken by a collector, the egg and the juvenile Great Auk are the only two specimens known to exist in the world. The adult Great Auk is just one of three known, If it wasn't for a collector taking these specimens then all we would have is perhaps a sketch or two which is not a great help for someone studying this species.

Harry
 
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re #142

I agree with Andy.

I recently had the privilege of going on a ‘dragon walk’ with Dave Smallshire (one of the national dragon experts and author of several important books on them) in Devon. He both carried and used a net. Observing dragons and damsels through a magnifying lens was entering a different and fascinating world: the creatures came alive in all sorts of new ways and allowed us to see details which, in the field, are impossible to perceive.

He did NOT slaughter the lovely things afterwards, either, but released them where caught.
 
Even if DNA studies could establish the area that the Hadleigh ones came from, it would tell us little more than that because we cannot say for certain when they arrived (eg. did they arrive in numbers shortly before being discovered this summer, or did a few arrive sometime last year and we are now seeing the result of sucessful breeding?).

Given the localised appearance of these and the numbers involved, one could imagine that they emerged at Hadleigh CP. That said, we don't know how long they take to reach maturity as larvae in England so they may have been the offspring of individuals that arrived 1, 2 or even 3 years ago.
 
Given the localised appearance of these and the numbers involved, one could imagine that they emerged at Hadleigh CP. That said, we don't know how long they take to reach maturity as larvae in England so they may have been the offspring of individuals that arrived 1, 2 or even 3 years ago.
A fair point. The length of time that it takes a dragonfly larva to mature can vary considerably due to climate.
If they had emerged at Hadleigh, and the larvae had been present in the ditches the adults were generally patrolling over, they must have matured fairly quickly though because the ditches were dry!
I guess we will never know if they were from a previous arrival - but we may find out how long their lifecycle takes in the UK in the near future.
 
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