The discussion elsewhere on this forum about old butterfly collections brings to mind another problem which I had been meaning to address this winter, but never gained the enthusiasm to get round to it.
My local museum has at least three collections hidden away, these are uncatalogued, so no-one knows what's in them. The rough descriptions indicate that these collections are made up of mainly foreign (Empire) and local species, the collectors having been military men or district officers in places that used to be painted red on the map. These chaps then retired to the English countryside and continued their hobby and left the resulting trays to the museum, where they can now only be viewed on the fifth Monday of any month between 11.00 and 11.15 as long as the part time curator is present (and he doesn't work Mondays).
I though that I might try and spend some time cataloguing these collections by copying the collectors labels, but then I wondered what use anyone would make of a such a list, so what's the point? Since I am probably incapable of spotting a var. on a rusty pin the only outcome that I can see is to have some early collecting data for the local area.
On the other hand local museums around the country must have any amount of this material, all going to waste, except to provide a meal for some resident moths. If there is a use for it then the first step is to catalogue and possibly photograph.
Old Butterfly collections (Historic?)
Re: Old Butterfly collections (Historic?)
Hi John,
Well worth doing! Quite apart from making your county recorder very happy, the data could be useful for all sorts of things - one example would be adding to the dataset of flight times where there is not a whole lot of historical information. It might be worth dropping a mail to Richard Fox at BC HQ for an idea of the sort of data that could be gathered.
The botanists think it's worthwhile enough doing this that they have setup an online website to digitise local collections http://herbariaunited.org/atHome/
Well worth doing! Quite apart from making your county recorder very happy, the data could be useful for all sorts of things - one example would be adding to the dataset of flight times where there is not a whole lot of historical information. It might be worth dropping a mail to Richard Fox at BC HQ for an idea of the sort of data that could be gathered.
The botanists think it's worthwhile enough doing this that they have setup an online website to digitise local collections http://herbariaunited.org/atHome/