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