A new way to maintain your moth life list

Posted by Graeme Lyons , Sunday, 29 October 2023 09:20

Wouldn't it be great if there was an online way to curate and store your moth lists? Well now there is! You can store your moth lists in BUBO. But wait, wouldn't it be great if not only counting your moths, you could count every single beetle, bird, lichen, slug and cetacean too? And not only that, compare what you have seen with others in a friendly, cooperative way and in doing so, become a serious all-round naturalist. There is! It's called pan-species listing and it has changed my life. It might just change yours.

Hold that thought. For now, back to moths...

The team at BUBO are releasing all the taxa in batches, to not overwhelm existing pan-species listers. I should point out that the official rankings are on the pan-species listing page so do please sign up to the pan-species listing website here and not just BUBO.

The moths are going to be released in batches, something like this:

  • Hawk-moths, prominents, footmen, tigers, burnets, clearwing, eggars, etc (all the macro families except geometrids and noctuids). Note, some moths that were in the Noctuidae are now in Erebidae and Nolidae, so there might be more in this first batch than you think!
  • Geometers
  • Noctuids
  • Pyralids
  • Tortricoids
  • The rest of the micros
We'll be releasing a batch every few days over the coming week/s. This lot only took me about 30 minutes to put on.

By the way, the top pan-species lister for moth is Tony Davis on 1702 species. Can you beat him?

If you are already a pan-species lister but have not used BUBO before or are not aware of what is going on here, read my blog here for more info. So far we have only put up butterflies, dragonflies, orthopteroids, herptiles, mammals and fish.

Note, that neither BUBO, nor the PSL website is a way to store records. PSL is all about sound biological recording, and we encourage people to submit records to their local recorders, recording schemes and through iRecord.

What's that I hear you say? Can I tick Kentish Glory from an egg? Yes. I have! If it's good enough for a record, it's good enough for my list. At the heart of PSL is the saying "your list, your rules." But do use your discretion!

1 Response to "A new way to maintain your moth life list"

Gibster Says:

I ticked Kentish Glory from the egg stage too! Mind you, the adults are a lot more exciting to watch.

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