Ever since I got into moths, some 5 years ago now, I’ve been toying with the idea of setting up a blog – somewhere I could write the occasional piece about the extraordinary wonders of BC Lepidoptera (BC: British Columbia, Canada; Lepidoptera: moths + butterflies).

I have iNaturalist.org to blame for all this. I’m now in my late 40’s and for most of my life, nature was to a large part unknowable. A brightly-coloured beetle would show up in my backyard one day and I’d spent hours scouring the internet for a match. No luck. A tree with particularly curious leaves would prove to be impossible to locate, even after picking up books on the subject. Fungi? Well let’s get serious. Fungi are just nuts. There’s a preposterous number of them out there, many of which look almost identical, many more of which are undescribed – especially here in the Pacific Northwest. So for years, all my attempted forays into nature beyond birds (which are as well-known as you’d like) would come to nought. Being able to pin a thing down taxonomically gives you a language and a foundation on which to build. And without that, frankly it felt hopeless. So I stuck to birds.

Then came iNaturalist.

iNaturalist is a website where anyone, regardless of experience can upload their observations and get them ID’d online partly through the community, and partly through the machine learning it uses to suggest matches for your photos. The site’s predictive model has come a long way and for a good number of species, it’s actually gotten really rather good. Soit’s all thanks to iNat that I got hooked on moths. Once I discovered that site, I started photographing every last living thing I ran into – insect, plant, fungi, bird, lichen, slime mould, you name it. And while I continue to be a general naturalist, I quickly found that moths topped my short list of Most Interesting Things.

I’m a pretty active observer of moths, but absolutely still an amateur. I don’t yet collect, but have just started pinning specimens collected by others. In the past 5 years I’ve seen 941 Lepidoptera species in the province and have every intention of seeing a whole lot more.

Anyway, a friendly hello from Bowen Island, BC. I’ll be using this site to post about anything that strikes me of interest about BC leps, collecting, identification, observation techniques and more. All the best!