I’m slowly embarking on some moth blacklighting and photography. First, I started blacklighting, thanks to Charlie Mitter and Amanda Roe. Then Jen Orth pointed me to the infamous CCRRFDv2 device for flash photography. Next I’ll have to learn more about collecting. Meanwhile, I’m learning that the bottleneck truly is identification. I don’t have access to a serious print guide to moths either at home or in my offices, and the online resources have not been consistently useful. So far I’ve tried:
bugguide.net — refreshing the page to review batches of thumbnails helps narrow down what group to explore
whatsthatbug.net — pictures and IDs are helpful, but there’s no particular organization
NBII’s Butterflies and Moths of North America — could be useful, but the images are organized by family and I don’t know those yet
Animal Diversity Web galleries — useful to browse through, but you cannot easily limit views to just adults or larvae
John Snyder has a brief tutorial to help narrow down major groups
Moth Photographers Group – a wealth of material, with useful full plates, especially Bob Patterson’s Moths of Prince George’s County, Maryland.
For a novice, like me, however, who wants to search visually, I recommend the Flickr group:
Field Guide: Butterflies & Moths of North America which has a nifty way to filter the photographs in the group pool by size and color:
BUTTERFLY KEY size x color.JPG
Originally uploaded by Anita Gould.
Of course, most of these sites lag when nomenclature changes over time, and the expertise of those who identify the images certainly varies. Ideally, I’d love to be able to filter a pool of photos by size, color, and location to get a reasonable sample to examine. This would require either a vast bank of photos or some smarts about geographic ranges.
In the end, when hours of searching haven’t been successful, there’s always the ID Please group at Flickr.
