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National Moth Week 2025
- Debbie Jordan
- 7 days ago
- 2 min read
It’s National Moth Week 2025 (19th-27th July)!
When John Ray was compiling Historia Insectorum, he wrote that he thought that he had managed to describe every variety of English butterfly, which actually he nearly had, but despaired because he thought he would never manage to describe all of the different species of moths.
In that aspect we can still sympathise with Ray because worldwide there are over 165,000 different species of moth of which 2,535 species have been recorded as naturally occurring in Britain. Furthermore, it is acknowledged that worldwide there are probably still a great many species that have not yet been described. Consequently, the study of moths is a continually evolving subject.
At Middleton Hall, over 500 different species of moths have been recorded. The wide variety is partly due to the very varied habitats contained in such a small area at Middleton. This enables a wide variety of flora to be supported. Different species of moths have evolved to feed on different plants and, therefore, the wider the variety of plants available in an environment, the wider the range of moths a habitat can support. Although butterflies have been known to be a very important pollinator of plants, in 2020, a study by the Royal Society revealed that moths were just as important particularly for nocturnal pollination.
In 2006, a study of moths at Middleton Hall was undertaken by Harvey Skelcher, who was a volunteer and trustee of Middleton Hall. He studied the natural activities in both the day and night, which involved spending many nights with his dog in the Bothy in the Walled Garden! In this survey in June alone, he recorded 149 different species of micro-moths and 216 different species of macro-moths. He also took many photographs of the moths he spotted at Middleton Hall and following his death they were donated to Middleton Hall. However, this has left Middleton Hall Trust with a slight issue. Although many of the photographs of moths were labelled, over 200 photographs of unidentified moths are now in our archive!
For this moth week we are asking for your help. We are posting photographs from our unidentified moth photographic collection. Can you help us put a name to them?
Further Reading: Brian W. Ogilvie, "Attending to Insects: Francis Willughby and John Ray", Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London, 20 December 2012, Vol. 66,
No. 4, pp. 357-372. https://www.jstor.org/stable/41723321.
Matt McGrath, "Nature crisis: Moths have 'secret role' as crucial pollinators", BBC News, 13 May 2020. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-52630991.
Author - Debbie Jordan, Middleton Hall Volunteer.
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