Quick summary report of a month-long trip to Creston. I just got back last night. For this post I thought I’d just do a high-level overview, then drill down into some more specific topics in separate posts because there’s a lot to say!

I chose Creston for two simple reasons:

1. I’d done a trip to the Kootenay’s a few years earlier and Creston was one of my favourite spots.
2. It’s very under-mothed. There’s surprisingly little data on iNat for the area and the geography of it being close to the US border looked promising for making new discoveries.

Final tally

Total species: 317
New species: 52
New for BC: 4*

Yeah! Four new species for the BC list. * They haven’t all been corroborated yet, but they were all fairly distinctive moths. So even though some are preposterously out of range, I think my IDs will stand. I’ll discuss the findings in a separate post.

Location, location, location (for the moth nets)

The map above shows my lep sightings for the trip. The bulk of my time was spent in Creston itself. It was a working trip, so for most of the time I had to set up traps close to my airbnb where I worked during the day (I’m a software developer at Microsoft). I found a very productive, discrete watershed area just 13 minutes SE of where I was staying in an area called Canyon. A gravel road threaded through amidst acres of open forest which afforded an interesting variety of places to set up the light traps. The only people I saw down there during the month were a single dog walker and kids on motorbikes, so I could set up my traps undisturbed. Zero problems.

Besides that main location, I also:

• set up traps just north of Creston on Arrow Mountain
• spent a weekend in Sparwood at the far east side of the province near the border with Alberta and set up traps in the mountains
• did a day trip and did a drive between Nelway and Montrose down by the US border – terrific spot for butterflies!

Collecting? Not so much.

I hadn’t particularly planned on not collecting, but it just worked out that way. Three weeks earlier I’d taken the plunge and tried out my first “kill jar” during a trip to Prince George. It wasn’t hardly something I enjoyed doing, but it was manageable and I don’t need any convincing that collection is necessary. However, I lost a few specimens due to the jar itself – too much sweating on the jar walls which caused the moths to get stuck on the sides, ruining their condition. So after getting some advice (and a new jar) I’d planned on a second attempt. But since a new batch of ethyl acetate didn’t arrive before I left for my trip while I was there, I decided to forego any collection until I got it all sorted out.

All in all

I guess all in all it was a good trip. I had unrealistic expectations of exactly how much mothing I’d be able to do, even given a whole month at my disposal. First, the weather was up and down – one time there was a full 5 days stretch with so much rain it wasn’t worth setting up nets. But secondly, my day job prevented me from going very far afield to set up nets, so I was pretty limited in where I could trap. I was regularly getting up at 5am to head out to empty the traps and would sometimes only barely make it back for my 8am start. In the end I only saw 150 new species of all sorts of life; I’d expected twice as much.

But! Still a productive trip and I’m very glad I went. I got a lot of new species over the month, but the final week things were really starting to heat up – temperature and moth-wise.