Olaf Otto Becker’s Greenland

“Under the Nordic Light: a Journey through Time” is a record of the vanishing of Greenland’s glaciers.

Visit the photographer’s website here: http://www.olafottobecker.de/ for more pictures, information about exhibitions and a clutch of perceptive essays.

It was forty-eight years ago today

The Beatles first appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show, February 1964. They performed:

All My Loving
Till There Was You
She Loves You
I Want to Hold Your Hand
I Saw Her Standing There

In the following fuzzy old TV clip, Sullivan does a Richard Nixon impersonation sporting a trademark Irish pig farmer’s haircut of the era and although clearly bewildered does his best to patronise his way through the moment.

Death of the Scharnhorst, 68 years ago today

68 years ago today off Norway’s North Cape, the German battleship Scharnhorst was sunk by a British force led by the battleship HMS Duke of York accompanied by the cruiser HMS Jamaica and other Royal Navy ships.

My father Capt. B.P. Sinha, then a young engineer officer on the Jamaica, told of gun flashes in the pitch darkness of a force 8 gale, the express train roar of shells passing overhead and the singing of men dying in icy water. This is to remember them all.

CLICK TO SEE THE WARTIME NEWSREEL

Belfast and Jamaica went in with torpedoes around 19:28 after which four destroyers, Musketeer, Matchless, Virago and Opportune rushed in but Scharnhorst was probably already going down. At 19:48 Belfast fired a star shell and saw oil soaked German sailors in the water. They heard them cheering their ship and singing ‘On A Sailors Grave No Roses Grow’, ‘Auf Ein Seemannsgrab Blühen Keine Rosen’.

Micronesian island uses ocean power to become energy self-sufficient

PETE DANKO, EARTH TECHLING & TOBY PRICE, RENEWABLE ENERGY MAGAZINE

PHOTOGRAPHY: JOHN PAPINEAU

Kosrae, one of the four Federated States of Micronesia out in the western Pacific, is aiming to get nearly all of its electricity from the ocean. That sounds pretty daunting, but luckily, it doesn’t need much electricity. The 8,000 people who inhabit Kosrae’s 42 square miles now get by with five Caterpillar engine generators that have a combined capacity of 4,580 kilowatts, according to the Kosrae Utilities Authority. And reports say the state will soon have a new 1.5-megawatt wave energy system, offering it a good start toward its marine-power goal.

Details are a little sketchy on the project, which we first learned about on the Renewable Energy Magazine website. That pointed us to Ocean Energy Kosrae, a joint venture between the utilities authority and Ocean Energy Industries, a New Jersey-based company that is supplying the wave device, called the WaveSurfer.

The company describes the WaveSurfer as a “point absorber” whose “main power conversion and generation parts are completely submerged at the depth of between 27 and 80 feet.” The company says this protects the device against damage from extreme storms.

According to Ocean Energy Industries: “Due to its unique design (patent pending) each WaveSurfer can be cost-effectively transported anywhere in the world and easily assembled at the installation site.” The company also says the device “does not contain expensive and complex parts, high precision hydraulics or air pumps … everything that makes other competing systems extremely expensive.”

Micronesia’s 2010 energy plan [PDF], envisages Kosrae getting 85 percent of its energy from wave power by 2015, with solar and hydro perhaps contributing the remaining 15 percent. It’s not the only island looking to go all-green: Earlier this year, the government of the Cook Islands, in the South Pacific, vowed to generate all its electricity from renewable sources use by 2020.

Missing the Missa Luba

The Missa Luba is a Latin Mass from the Congo sung by a boys choir, Les Troubadours du Roi Baudouin, trained by Father Guido Haazen, a Franciscan Friar. The original performance was recorded in 1958 in Kamina, Congo. It was released as an LP in 1963. When we were living in India in the mid sixties my family had a copy and we listened over and over to its rhythms, harmonies and birdlike vocal calls.

The Sanctus from Missa Luba featured in Lindsey Anderson’s film If, and some of the music was recorded by other performers, but the original has never been surpassed, nor reissued in its original form.

I’ve found several of the songs from Missa Luba, and you can listen to them here.

Bringing the famous Classey-Robinson exhibit back to life

It’s October 28, 1950. Through the august portal of Burlington House, Piccadilly, home of the Royal Society, a crowd of people, mostly men, is passing.

These are the nation’s leading entomologists, experts in the Diptera (two-winged flies), Hymenoptera (wasps, bees and ants), Homoptera (cicadas, spittlebugs), Odonata (damsels and dragonflies), Phasmatodae (stick insects), Hemiptera (bugs) and a host of others. In the spotlight today are the Neuroptera (lacewings and antlions) and the Orthoptera (locusts), but probably in greatest abundance are the connoisseurs of the Coloeoptera (beetles) and especially the Lepidoptera (butterflies and moths). Examples of all these orders and families will be on show inside the building.

The occasion is the Annual Exhibition of the South London Entomological and Natural History Society. Last night, according to custom, the Society dined together in the Charing Cross Hotel, where out-of-towners will have put up for the night. One can imagine the late bar crowded with people discussing this or that aberration, and everyone is agog to see the green moths that E.W. Classey and H.S. Robinson have brought back from County Clare on the west coast of Ireland.

Exhibit 60, entered jointly by E.W. Classey and H.S. Robinson, was the highlight of the show. In a single specimen drawer were both the year’s new additions to the British list: Luceria virens, the Burren Green, the specimens taken by Eric Classey’s expedition; and Diarsia floridaThe Fenland Square-Spot, a bred series of the moth which had been identified for the first time that July in Yorkshire’s Askham Bog.

Also much talked about were the exhibit’s long series of the Heart and Dart, Agronista exclamationis and Brown-line Bright Eyes Hadena lepida, taken in a single night and there to illustrate the vast attractive power of Hugh Robinson’s new mercury vapour moth trap, which had been tested on the Burren expedition and the previous month to great excitement. The drawer thus showcased three major firsts for British entomology.

FULL DESCRIPTION OF THE EXHIBIT IN THE SOCIETY’S PROCEEDINGS 1950-53

Download a PDF facsimile of the entire book, complete with illustrations.

RECONSTRUCTING THE CLASSEY-ROBINSON EXHIBIT

1. The empty drawer as it is today, 60 years later

Why is the drawer empty? One explanation is that Eric Classey, with characteristic generosity, had donated most of the expedition’s Burren Green specimens, including the pupa, to the Society. Other specimens had gone to friends and fellow collectors. However this doesn’t explain why every single specimen has vanished.

What if after the exhibition Classey simply returned the moths to their usual homes in the collection. If this is what happened, the moths, or most of them, should still be there and it would be possible to reconstruct the exhibit using moths from the collection. I decided to try. Below, step by step, are the results.

2. Preparing the partitions

This reconstruction is done photographically. The widths of the partitions reflect the sizes of the moths that were placed in them. This becomes important when considering the two central sections, which have no labels and helps confirm that these were once occupied, as suggested by the order given in the Society Proceedings by the Burren Greens and the Fenland Square-Spot, the two sensational discoveries of that year.

3. Agronista exclamationis, the Heart-and-Dart

The first two series in the drawer were caught to demonstrate the value of H.S. Robinson’s new mercury vapour light trap. Their shared label says: ‘Each series [was] selected from a single night’s “catch” at a Mercury Vapour trap to show the wide variation occuring in one place and at one time – which is apparent when it is possible to select from very large numbers.’

The basic problem with moth-hunting had always been that the quarry flies at night, when nets are not much use. Some enthusiasts swore by ‘sugar’, smearing tree trunks and wooden doors with exotic mixtures based on molasses and possibly including rum, rotting fruit, raisins, beer and ingredients too vile to mention. C. fraxini was typically taken this way.

Moths throng to lamps, so another method was to place a Tilley lamp on a white sheet and wait for the moths to come and settle. Robinson’s mercury-vapour moth trap was a huge advance because its light went into the ultra violet range, attracting more insects, which then found themselves trapped inside a box, or casing, generally lined with egg boxes where they could settle. The large numbers caught unharmed in the trap could then be examined and collected or released.

4. Hadena lepida, the Tawny Shears (or Brown-line Bright Eye)

See A. exclamationis, above. Classey knew this species by its lovely old name, the Tawny Shears.

Like the Heart and Dart, this moth is fairly plentiful and displays quite a range of variation in the ground colour and intensity of wing markings, with paler specimens being commoner in the south-east and darker or duller ones in the north and west of the country.

What better species to demonstrate the power of the mercury-light trap? With hundreds of candidates fluttering into the trap it is much easier to pick specimens to illustrate a wide range of variation.

5. Catocala sponsa, the Dark Crimson Underwing

This beautiful moth is now extinct in the British Isles, except for a colony in the New Forest, where they are still grimly clinging on.

The situation sixty years ago was evidently not quite as desperate because Classey was able to rear, from eggs taken from a wild female near Ham Street, north Kent, a series of C. sponsa which he pointedly remarks are different from the New Forest form.

However the event was unusual enough to justify including a series of fine moths in his exhibit.

This form of the Dark Crimson Underwing, represented in the exhibit and abundant in the collection, has now vanished.

6. Luceria virens, the Burren Green, a new addition to the British list

The empty exhibit drawer is nineteen down in the third (right hand) cabinet. I found Classey’s Burren Green specimen parked next-door in drawer nineteen of the central cabinet with some Wainscots in whose society it did not really belong.

The collection as a whole was organised in families reflecting the British list, to which of course Luceria virens was a newcomer, so when the exhibit was emptied it had no home to go to, and was simply placed in the nearest drawer.

Classey had originally exhibited a number of Burren Green specimens and the pupa which proved they were breeding in Ireland. These went to the Society, to expedition members and collector friends. The specimen that remains is the one that Classey chose to keep for himself.

The specimen is rather faded, but one can still see the faint green flush in its wings. The moth is known to fade. Dr Skat Hoffmeyer of Aarhus, Denmark, quoted by the great P.B.M. Allan, said, “L. virens is not a species which adorns one’s collection; it soon becomes greasy and fades deplorably.”

A collector whose name I can’t now remember recommended taking only newly-hatched moths while their wings were still drying as they are then at their most brilliant. More than a little mean, I thought. Let them at least flutter about a bit. Thank goodness we now have cameras with macro lenses.

7. Diarsia florida, the Fenland Square-Spot, a new addition to the British list

The other great discovery of 1950 and like L. virens, a new addition to the British list. The consequence of this was that there was no ready printed label for this species and the handwritten label that eventually identified it was so faint that I nearly missed it in the drawer full of its cousins.

The series was bred from stock obtained from Askham Bog in Yorkshire by Classey’s friend the collector Dr Edward Cockayne, whose vast collection is now part of the Natural History Museum’s British National Collection of moths and butterflies.

Cockayne also showed these moths at the exibition. Their inclusion in Classey’s exhibit one may surmise is partly homage to his friend, but it meant that he was exhibiting the year’s two sensational discoveries, side by side.

Classey’s decision to include D. florida in his exhibit may have been a late one, as this is the only species for which he did not type out a label. Possibly it appeared above the small handwritten scrap of paper which remains in the collection, stapled beneath the three remaining D. florida specimens.

Gerry Hagget, on Eric Classey’s tribute website made by his family, recalls Eric in pursuit of D. florida:

There are occasions in life when a catch-phrase is invented only to recur at future occasions. Eric went with Les Goodson to Askham Bog when Diarsia florida was first known. They had set up lamps with the Warden and it was not long before a quite different species appeared worthy of comment. “Oh no”, said the Warden “it can’t be that because it doesn’t occur here!” This it was thereafter whenever a location produced an unusual resident there was the repeated chorus along with knowing chuckles and Eric in the lead.

8. Hadena compta Schiff, the Varied Coronet

These are the moths mentioned in the Proceedings as having been bred from wild larvae obtained in Dover. They are identified by the long typewritten label.

The type is more modern than the robust old fashioned Underwood font of Classey’s typewriter and the label was conceivably typed by Dr. Edward Cockayne who appears to have sent the moths to Classey along with D. florida as a response to Classey’s gift to him of 30 eggs of the Burren Green, Luceria virens.

A series of H. compta bred from the Dover larvae appeared in Dr Cockayne’s exhibit and included one aberration defasciata Hannemann and an example of homeosis. Cockayne exhibited the moths to show their variation. Classey followed his own bred series with a wild specimen caught in Ireland, which appears slightly larger than the Kentish race.

9. Plusia festucae, the Gold Spot

These moths live in drawer 12 of the third cabinet along with a long series of the Burnished Brass and other insects whose wing spots look as if they have been laid on in pure gold leaf.

Classey exhibited a pair of these moths, one of the normal type, the other with ‘united’ wingspots. Here are the two I used in the reconstruction.

10. Laphygma exigua, the Small Mottled Willow

The signficance of this little moth appears to be the date of its capture, February, in the depths of winter. It could not have survived long in the wild.

L. exigua is an immigrant, crossing the Channel from the continent, and most abundant in the late summer, suggesting that the summer moths are the second brood of immigrants arriving earlier in the year. 1950 was not one of the its most abundant years.

11. Callimorpha dominula ab. juncta, aberrant form of the Scarlet Tiger

The collection contains a whole drawer full of Callimorpha dominula which, as its scientific name suggests, appears in many different forms, all of them very beautiful.

In the drawer are many varying forms, including dark bimacula and the brilliant yellow ab.lutescens.

As the following article tells, I got into a muddle trying to find a specimen that could be described as ab. juncta, which I took to mean the colour bleeding from wing spots into the wing and connecting the spots. This should properly apply to the forewing, but the specimen I chose has striking spread of black in the hindwing. It’s not one of these.

These three show the normal (but for the Scarlet Tiger what is normal?) form, the dark bimacula and the magnificent yellow ab. lutescens forms.

Classey’s moth had been hatched by Edward Cockayne from a larva from Itchen Abbas in Hampshire earlier in the year.

A lot of the insects in the drawer are from the collector H. Haynes, a Wiltshire man, whose death the Society recorded with regret in 1951. The Entomologist’s Record for 1943 reveals that he had bred a series of Panaxia {the old name for Callimorpha) dominula, L., from the Salisbury district showing specimens with enlarged and confluent markings in forewings.

12. Hydraecia lucens, the Large Ear

Besides L. virens Classey exhibited a number of moths the expedition had taken in Co. Clare in August 1950. This fine pair of Large Ears, taken on August 19th, were among them. There is a column of four Large Ears in drawer 2:17 of the collection. The 1950 specimens are the central two. The two English specimens show distinctly darker coloration.

13. Cycnia mendica ab., the Muslin Ermine, aberrant form

Classey caught this little white moth during a collecting trip to Lymington, in June 1950. He refers to it simply as ‘an aberration’. There are twenty specimens in the collection, of which two females have odd dark markings on the leading edge of their forewing tips. Normal females have pure white wing-tips with no markings.

I have chosen the more exagerrated of the two variants to represent Classey’s C. mendica, ab.. This specimen also has broad dark markings splashed on the body where normal specimens have none.

14. Heliothis armigera, the Scarce Bordered Straw

Another moth taken by Classey’s expedition in Co. Clare in August 1950. It is known by at least a dozen synonyms, and is nowadays generally called Helicoverpa armigera, being less politely referred to as The Cotton Bollworm.

Please notice that it has wonderfully curly antennae, the sort Dali would have envied, flamboyant as any desperado should be.

Armigera is a pest of just about every crop known to man. According to UK government risk assessors at DEFRA, ‘The most important crop hosts of which H. armigera is a major pest are tomato, cotton, pigeon pea, chickpea, sorghum and cowpea. Other hosts include dianthus, rosa, pelargonium, chrysanthemum, groundnut, okra, peas, field beans, soybeans, lucerne, Phaseolus spp., other Leguminosae, tobacco, potatoes, maize, flax, a number of fruits (Prunus, Citrus), forest trees and a range of vegetable crops.’ Is there anything it won’t eat? Its caterpillars have even been known to eat one another.

The moth’s home territory is southern Europe and North Africa. It can make thousand mile journeys to reach the south coast of Britain but rarely gets beyond. Possibly this gives a clue to its inclusion here. County Clare is 350 miles further on. Fair play to the little divill.

15. Hydrillula pallustris, the Marsh Moth

Eric Classey took H. pallustris in June 1950 at Woodwalton Fen. Why was it included? Well, the moth is scarce.

For most the capture of a single male in a season was considered ‘good going’ as palustris is a moth of retiring habits and is very erratic in its appearance at the light. The female has been found in the wild state only on two or three occasions – Proceedings of the S. L. E. & N. H. S.

Classey’s specimen came from Woodwalton Fen, which the Society was actively trying to save from development. Three months after the 1950 exhibition, the Society’s President, Air Marshal Sir Robert Saundby, addressing the assembled membership, felt the need to deliver a homily on the subject:

When looking through the list of subscribers to the Wicken Fen Fund I was rather surprised to note that, apart from the two guineas subscribed by the Society as a corporate body, only twenty of our members had supported the Fund.

Air Marshal Sir Robert Saundby.
World War I air ace, in World War II he was No. 2 at RAF Bomber Command.
No one remembers that he was a lepidopterist.

Now I am quite well aware that there are a number of people who do not agree with the way in which these nature reserves are managed, but I think we should all agree that they ought to be kept in being. If Wicken or Woodwalton Fens were given up, they would, in a very few years, be losit to us for ever. They would undoubtedly be drained and brought under cultivation, in common with all the other former fen lands of the East Anglian levels.

Looking after these reserves costs money, and it is not sufficient just to prevent the Fen from going derelict. Last year the Wicken Fen Fund raised a sum, after paying expenses, of £57 8s, which was handed to the National Trust. The amount raised by the Fund has been gradually falling, year by year, while the expenses of keeping the Fen going have, like most other things, risen sharply.
The annual cost of the upkeep of the Fen is now about £800 a year. It is true that, in 1948, the University of Cambridge, in order to save the Fen, accepted financial responsibility for £450 a year. But this does not mean that the financial problems of the upkeep of the Fen have been solved. In their rejjort for 1947-48 the Local Committee said:—” The Committee hopes that this grant, far from having the effect of discouraging subscribers will greatly increase their number, and hopes that subscribers will feel that, whereas in the past their contributions may have seemed little more than a drop in the bucket, the money they can give now will result in really tangible improvement of conditions in the Fen.”

These hopes have not been fulfilled. I am not suggesting that large subscriptions are needed, but if a substantial proportion of our members would be prepared to subscribe a few shillings a year, what a difference it would make. Here, I suggest, is a cause which should appeal to every naturalist, whatever his interests.

16. Minucia lunaris Schiff., Lunar Double-Stripe, suffused wings

Classey bred these moths from wild larvae taken near Ham Street in north Kent. He describes them as ‘a suffused aberration’. Six of these bred moths are in the collection, in drawer 3:13, giving a choice of specimens for the reconstruction. I chose the bottom two as being easiest to Photoshop, but the top two are more colourful and they are shown here.

This is as far as I could get with reconstructing the exhibit with moths still in the collection.

17. The exhibit as it appeared in October 1950

Photoshop is a wonderful imago-processing tool. It breeds moths faster than you can blink, cutting out the egg, larva and pupal stages. Where there was a column of three, we now have twenty one. We can clone L. virens indefinitely. In short, it is easy to finish by filling the gaps and showing what the exhibit would have looked like on October 28th, 1950.

Only three exhibit species are no longer in the collection but I have put in pictures sourced elsewhere to complete the drawer. The three are the White-Lined SphinxCelerio lineata, a Brighton Wainscot, Oria musculosa and three specimens of the Deep Brown Dart Aporophyla lutulenta ab. sedi bred from pupae which Classey had found in Ireland. To this moth attaches the following interesting tale:

SPECIES MENTIONED ON EXHIBIT LABELS AND IN THE SOCIETY PROCEEDINGS

A √ indicates species that remain in the collection. Cabinet and drawer numbers are given, thus 2:4 is cabinet 2, drawer 4. A ø marks moths no longer in the collection.

√ Heart and Dart – Agrotis exclamationis (long series in 2:4)

√ Brown-line Bright Eye – Hadena lepida – not mentioned by the Society – 6 specimens in 2:11

√ Dark Crimson Underwing – Catocala sponsa (extinct except possibly in the New Forest, 17 specimens not of New Forest type in 3:14)

√ Fen Square-Spot - Diarsia florida – series bred from Askham Bog, Yorks, 1950 (in Proceedings but no label in drawer – Classey had sent his friend Edward Cockayne 30 eggs of the Burren Green from Ireland, and Cockayne responded with a series of H. compta (next entry) and this Diarsia florida series. Like the Burren Green, D. florida was a new addition to the British list that year. 3 specimens in 2:7 )

√ Varied Coronet – Hadena compta – Hatched from larva by Cockayne, the second series he sent Classey. (8 specimens plus 1 wild caught by Classey in Ireland in 2:11)

ø White-lined Sphinx - Celerio lineata – (not in collection)

√ Small Mottled Willow – Laphygma exigua – √ (11 specimens in 3:2)

ä РPlusia festucae (19 specimens in 3:12)

√ ? Scarlet Tiger – Panaxia dominula ab. juncta – (conjoined spots, possible candidates in 1:18)

ø Deep Brown Dart – Aporophyla lutulenta ab. sedi (not in collection)

√ Large Ear – Hydraecia lucens – Taken during the Burren expedition August 1950 √ (4 specimens in 2:17)

√ Muslin Moth – Cycnia mendica Ab. – Taken in Lymington, June 1950 (20 specimens in 1:15)

ø Brighton Wainscot – Oria musculosa – 1 also taken at Lymington (not in collection)

√ Scarce Bordered Straw – Heliothis armigera – taken Co. Clare, August 1950 √ (9 specimens in 3:11)

√ Marsh Moth – Hydrillula palustris – taken in Woodwalton Fen, June 1950 (1 specimen in 3:2)

√ Lunar Double-Stripe – Minucia lunaris Ab. (suffused) – bred from wild larva, Ham Street, 1950 (6 specimens in 3:13)

A love story in 6,000 moths

Twenty five years ago, I bought a stunning sixty-drawer collection of British moths to prevent it being broken up. I knew nothing about the collection and had no time to examine it. I felt very strongly that selling it off one specimen at a time was an act of vandalism that would extinguish its scientific value, and render the deaths of 6,000 lovely creatures meaningless. 

WRITER: INDRA SINHA, PHOTOGRAPHY: ROBERT DOWLING

The collection contained long exquisite series of insects, few of which I recognised. I did not have leisure to catalogue them and it must have been some months before I reached down to the foot of one of the cabinets and pulled open a drawer empty except for a scattering of old labels naming the moths that had once inhabited it, and a note that said: “Joint Exhibit by E.W. Classey & H. S. Robinson”.

A sticker pasted on its glass lid bore the initials S. L. E. & N. H. S. and identified the drawer as Exhibit 60 and the date as 1950. None of this meant anything to me. I slid the drawer shut.

My fascination with moths had begun as a child in the jungles of India’s Western Ghats mountains. To my bedroom window every night giant Saturniid moths came tapping: the moon-moth Actias selene whose pale wings and long swooping tails were luminous in moonlight; huge moths like Loepa katinka and Antheraea mylitta with wings like patterned silk robes. I would let them in and tempt them with sugary drops on the tip of my finger.

In the early eighties my wife and I moved to Sussex and through our open summer windows the moths flew in squadrons.

Sitting on curtains, or fluttering at bulbs, they seemed drab, but when we looked closely their forewings were all spangles and zigzags and stripes. What appeared grey or brown was really a pattern of subtle hues, and the hidden hindwings were often brilliantly coloured. Our visitors stared back at us with solemn, dark eyes. They wore their wings like furred capes, hunched round the shoulders; their feathery antennae quivered with intelligence. The collector’s passion burned in me but I didn’t want to kill moths, so I started hunting for a Robinson mercury vapour light trap and a suitable camera, and whilst on this quest I came across the collection.

My bedtime reading of those days was books like P. B. M. Allan’s A Moth-Hunter’s Gossip, about the men who night after night went out sugaring, setting light traps, carefully hatching eggs and sleeving larvae.

I combed second-hand bookshops for old entomology journals, today horrifyingly expensive, but twenty years ago nobody seemed to want them. I found them riveting. They offered good timeless advice about breeding and rearing, and accurate descriptions of the moths of the vanished pre-industrial landscape. In The Naturalist’s Library, Vol.4: British Moths, 1836, Sir William Jardine spoke of the Blue Underwing:

C. Fraxini is the largest moth found in this country the expansion of the wings sometimes reaching four inches The thorax and upper wings are light grey on the surface the latter variegated with transverse undulating lines of brown The under wings are brownish black with a broad curved band of light blue across the middle The fringe of all the wings is pure white deeply indented and preceded by a row of dusky triangular marks having the point turned outwards which is most distinct in the hinder wings The under side of the body and legs are white the tarsi of the anterior pair spotted with brown above The caterpillar lives on the ash poplar oak elm birch &c. It is ash coloured, more or less yellowish and sprinkled with minute black dots. The head is greenish with two frontal black crescents the eighth segment having a dorsal protuberance, a bluish black colour and marked with a few yellow spots. On the ninth segment there is an oblique black line extending to the hinder stigmata, the latter are all surrounded with a black ring It spins a very loose cocoon among a few leaves and changes into a reddish brown chrysalis powdered with pale blue and having two small blue tubercles on each side of the fourth and fifth segments It is a rare insect in this country and indigenous specimens in good condition may still be regarded as a valuable addition to a cabinet.

The Clifden Nonpareil remains one of Britain’s rarest moths. Most entomologists consider themselves blessed to encounter one in a lifetime. My collection had four. This should have told me something about the person who had filled its drawers, but it didn’t.

As I pored over the entomology journals I would often come across a name that seemed familiar, although I couldn’t say why. It now seems strange that it took so long before I connected the name in the journals with the empty drawer in my collection of moths.

At last I reopened the drawer. A bit of delving in my moth library revealed that S. L. E. & N. H. S. must be the South London Entomological & Natural History Society which later became the British Entomological Society. Its annual meeting of 1950 had been held, as was customary, at the Royal Society in Piccadilly. The name of E.W. Classey had rung bells with me because he had published some of the entomological books I was reading. Robinson, incredibly, was still obscure. Something was staring me in the face and I still didn’t get it.

I began reading about Eric Classey. He was born in 1916 and from childhood was unable to resist anything that crawled or fluttered. At school he was ‘Bugs’. Aged 18, he was hired by the Natural History Museum. He went on to run a famous butterfly dealership, founded the Entomologist’s Gazette and without any publishing experience became a world-class publisher of books on entomology. The more I read about him, the more I was impressed.

Eric Classey had known all the great entomologists of his day, and introduced them to the people who would be their successors. He was a generous mentor to young lepidopterists, lending them equipment and books, giving away expensive volumes to people who couldn’t afford them but who in his opinion deserved them. He was an entomologist’s entomologist. His field expeditions were legendary and the most famous of all was his trip to Ireland to search for the moth that became known as the Burren Green. In an old copy of the Entomologist’s Gazette I read Classey’s own account of the expedition.

In August 1949 Captain W.S. Wright, a botanist, found a small green moth not far from Yeat’s tower near Gort in Co. Galway. It was a species unfamiliar to him so he brought it to Eric Classey for identification. Classey recognised the moth as Luceria virens (today Calamia tridens), a noctuid, unremarkable except for the Gaelic green of its wings when newly-hatched. There was, however, a mystery: the patriotic little creature was draped in the wrong flag. L. virens had never before been recorded in the British Isles. Its nearest known colonies were in France and Denmark, hundreds of miles away.

Classey had a hunch that the moth was breeding in Ireland. Just ten miles from Gort were the surreal limestone landscapes of the Burren of Clare. Botanists had noted that the influence of the Gulf Stream on the riven rock masses created a unique microclimate where alpine plants and Mediterranean plants grew side by side. It was altogether a strange and unexplored place. Could green moths be breeding in the Burren?

In August 1950, Classey and his friends the brothers H.S. and P.B. Robinson piled their gear, including two exceedingly heavy prototypes of Robinson’s newly-invented mercury-light moth trap, into an old modified Bentley and headed for the Dublin ferry.

The weather when they arrived at the Burren was filthy, gales and rain, with fresh tumult brewing out beyond the Aran Islands. Nevertheless the friends set about their business, each night setting the light traps, by day entertaining the locals who turned out en masse to watch ‘the foine gentlemen chasin floies’. Several L. virens were taken the wing, but it was the discovery of a pupa (and thirty eggs which Classey sent to his collector friend Dr Edward Cockayne) that established that the green moth was indeed breeding in Ireland. Classey named it the Burren Green. Its addition to the British list was a triumph.

Classey went on to become President of the British Entomological and Amateur Entomologists’ Societies, and a Fellow of the Royal Entomological Society. In 1983 he was elected to the Entomological Club, the world’s oldest and most exclusive entomological society, which only ever has eight members. Honours were heaped upon him, but it was the Burren Green for which he would be remembered for the rest of his life, and sixty-eight years later in his obituaries.

Reading the story of the Burren Green filled me with fear, because at last the penny had dropped. Classey and Robinson were the names in the collection I had bought all those years earlier. I was fairly sure that labels in the empty drawer referred to specimens taken in County Clare. I checked and they were caught in August 1950. It could only have been during the famous Burren Green expedition.

On what date had the S. L. E. & N. H. S. exhibition been held? I unearched the Society’s Proceedings for 1951-3 and there, sure enough, was an account of the 1950 exhibition. The date was October 28th, two months after Classey and the Robinsons returned from the Burren.

What followed was like the unfolding of a detective story. I started examining the collection’s 411 species of moths and checking the specimens against the labels in the empty drawer and immediately began to find moths from the empty exhibit drawer.

There was the long series of A. exclamationis taken in Robinson’s moth trap to prove its value as a collecting tool.

There was the Gold Spot with fused spots on its forewing.

There was Catocala sponsa, the series of Crimson Underwings now extinct but for a few survivors in the New Forest. Classey had bred them from a wild female taken near his home in north Kent and noted their difference from the New Forest type.

In a drawer of wildly varying Scarlet Tigers I struggled to identify Callimorpha dominula ab. juncta’s bled-together wing marks but found a series of the handsome yellow form above a hand-written label ab. lutescens. I was puzzled as I thought lutescens was the yellow form of the Jersey Tiger, not realising in my ignorance that it is commonly used for yellow variants. Identification was made more difficult by the fact that many scientific and common names had changed since Classey’s day. Callimorpha for example is now Panaxia. The moth has many beautiful forms, hence the old name.

The description of the exhibit in the Society’s Proceedings matches the labels in the empty drawer, with the species listed from left to right and, in the final section, from top to bottom. The varying width of the partitions reflects the sizes of the moths they housed. Thus two columns of Agrotis exclamationis and one of Hadena lepida were followed by one of the larger Catocala sponsa. The next two partitions have no labels but if we follow the description in the Proceedings the Burren Greens must have come next, fresh from Co. Clare, followed by the bred series of Diarsia florida. These two species were additions to the British list in 1950, and deserved centre stage.

Where was the Burren Green?

Surely Classey would have saved at least one choice specimen for his own collection. I searched again and at last, in the nineteenth drawer of the central cabinet with a few old Wainscots for company I found a small faded moth in whose forewings a faint flush of green was still visible. Beneath it a label read Luceria virens L. AN ADDITION TO THE BRITISH LIST. The moth’s data label confirmed it had been taken in the Burren, Co. Clare, on 18th August, 1950.

I had found Classey’s Burren Green.

In the cabinets I eventually found twelve of the exhibit’s sixteen species and probably about three quarters of the specimens.

I knew that Eric Classey have given most of his immense collection to the Natural History Museum where, with the collections of his friends Miriam Rothschild and Edward Cockayne, it forms the core of the British national collection of butterflies and moths.

What then were my three cabinets?

Undoubtedly they were Classey’s. He had bred or caught many of the moths in the drawers, set them and mounted them, row on row, with the meticulous care for which he was noted. We can virtually trace each specimen from places and dates in the entomological records.

On September 10th, 1950, Eric Classey and four other members of the S. L. E. & N. H. S. went beating for larvae near Ash Vale in Surrey. (This means hitting branches with sticks to shake caterpillars into a sheet, the idea being to rear them to the moth stage.) Of the first twenty-six species listed in Classey’s report of that day’s work, twenty-four appear in the cabinets, mostly in adjacent drawers.

The cabinets I found and rescued all those years ago must have been Eric Classey’s working collection, housing his ongoing work of the period as well as things precious to him: the Burren Green he chose from among those taken on the August 1950 trip to Clare; the exhibit drawer from the October 1950 exhibition and most of the moths that had been in it.

Classey must have taken dozens of drawers like this to exhibitions, and if he chose to preserve just this one, perhaps it was to remember one of the most famous exhibits in British entomological history, celebrating as it did three major firsts: the two additions to the British list, and the long series of moths proving the power of Robinson’s new light trap, which duly caused huge excitement. More than twenty years later, in 1974, the Times recalled its launch:

H.S. Robinson momentarily blinded a room full of entomologists from a chair no less august than that of the president of the Royal Society when he publicly demonstrated the hyper-attractive powers of the mercury vapour light trap, sometimes reckoned the collector’s H-bomb.

The exhibit is the collection in miniature. It demonstrates Classey’s interests: not simply amassing specimens in great numbers, but making new scientific discoveries, encouraging better methods of collecting, and specialising in rarities, things out of the ordinary.

Classey was himself a rarity, a passionate eccentric figure, to whom moth-hunting was not just science but adventure, round whom stories collected and became legends. Behind the facade of a world-renowned scientist beat the heart of a boy. Well into his eighties Classey, driving along a country lane, was apt to do an emergency stop and frantically reverse because he had glimpsed something fluttering in a hedge.

For Eric Classey’s friends, family and fellow moth-enthusiasts, these drawers hold not just moths but stories and memories. Recently I had the pleasure of meeting Holly Seddon, Eric’s granddaughter, who came to see the collection. Talking to her, I realised that what I have presented as a detective story is really a love story: the story of Eric Classey’s lifelong love of things that flutter and go whirr in the night.

Worth a flutter? Why the Burren Green is back in the news.

•

BBC TV NEWS ON THE SALE OF THE COLLECTION

The E.W. Classey Burren Green Collection of British moths

To be auctioned at Gorringe’s, Lewes, East Sussex, on June 29, 2011.

This is Eric Classey’s own collection of British moths, including his Burren Green specimen dated August 18, 1950 taken in the Burren, County Clare, Eire during his now-legendary expedition with the Robinson brothers and Captain W.S. Wright.

The previous year Wright, a botanist, had found a curious bedraggled moth in Co. Galway and sent it to Classey for identification. It was Luceria virens, (now known as Calamaria tridens), but its presence was an absolute mystery. The small green noctuid had never been recorded in the British Isles, its nearest known habitats were hundreds of miles away in France and Denmark.

The August 1950 expedition to the Burren

Classey wondered if the moth could actually be breeding in Ireland. Near where Wright had found the green moth were the surreal limestone landscapes of the Burren of Clare. Botanists had noted that the influence of the Gulf Stream on the riven rock masses created a unique microclimate where alpine plants and Mediterranean plants grew side by side. Could the green moths be breeding in the Burren? It was only a dozen miles from where the 1949 specimen had been found – much more credible.

Mr. E. W. Classey—Plants from the Burren of Clare, a limestone mountain range on the West Coast of Ireland showing Arctic and Mediterranean elements in the flora of the district: (1) Neotinea intarta (Link) Rchb., the Close-flowered Orchid, a famous flower of the district, not found elsewhere in Northern Europe. Its distribution, other than in W. Ireland, embraces the shores of the Mediterranean. (2) Anteanaria dioica (L.) Gaertn., Cat’s-foot or Mountain Cudweed, an Arctic and Alpine plant – The Proceedings of the S. L. E. & N. H. S., 1951.

In August 1950, Classey, accompanied by the brothers H.S. and P.B. Robinson, set off for Ireland to hunt for Luceria virens. H S. was eager to try out his newly-invented mercury vapour moth trap, designed to solve the moth hunter’s fundamental problem, that the quarry flies at night when it is too dark for nets. Sugar could be set to attract the insects, but Robinson was convinced that his light trap would produce many times the number of candidate specimens. He had two prototypes, both extremely heavy. In the end the expedition with all its gear including the moth hunters made the trip in the ponderous comfort of a modified Bentley owned by P.B..

Classey and his friends soon caught several L. virens on the wing – to the amusement and mystification of the locals who turned out to watch, as Classey noted, ‘the gentlemen chasin’ floies’ – but it was the discovery of a pupa that proved that Luceria virens, or Calamia tridens as it is today known, was not just a casual visitor but was living and breeding in the Burren. Classey named the moth the Burren Green, and this new addition to the British list sealed his fame as an entomologist.

The October 1950 S. L. E. & N. H. S. Annual Exhibition at the Royal Society

Classey drew from his collection to compile, in association with his friend H. S. Robinson, a ground-breaking exhibit for the October 1950 Annual Exhibition of the South London Entomological & Natural History Society Exhibition. The exhibit (no. 60 in the catalogue) embodied two historic achievements. (catalogue description here).

Robinson’s mercury vapour light trap made it possible to choose from huge numbers of each species taken on particular nights and at specific places. Several interesting and scientifically valuable series of moths duly joined Classey’s collection. A long series of Agrotis exclamationis was exhibited alongside the Burren Green, to demonstrate the power and value of Robinson’s invention.

Classey generously donated most of his Luceria virens specimens including the pupa to the S. L. E. & N. H. S. (now the British Entomological Society) but retained a keynote specimen for his own collection (Chest 2, Drawer 19) along with a series of 11 A. exclamationis (Chest 2, Drawer 4) . This collection thus facilitated two historic achievements in British entomology.

For the story of how the collection was rediscovered and saved from being broken up, please see Saving the Clifden Nonpareil from a fate worse than death .

THE BURREN GREEN COLLECTION COMPLETE LIST OF SPECIES/SPECIMENS
WITH PHOTOGRAPHS OF EACH DRAWER (CLICK TO ENLARGE):

CABINET ONE • CABINET TWO • CABINET THREE.

The moths and memories Eric Classey reserved to himself

CONTAINING THE FAMOUS OCTOBER 1950 JOINT-EXHIBIT BY E. W. CLASSEY AND H. S. ROBINSON

Early in his career Eric Classey decided to present his fine collection of moths to the Natural History Museum.

It is there that one will find the bulk of his extensive collection, including his studies of microlepidoptera. They are now part of the British national collection of butterflies and moths administered by the Cockayne Trust, of which he served a term as Chairman.

These cabinets contain what Classey retained for himself: his personal working collection of British moths, their drawers serving as homes for the specimens that passed through his hands in the course of his work as a field collector, breeder, scholar and scientist. These included moths that he had had reared from eggs or larvae, exchanged with other entomologists as well as specimens of peculiar interest or rarity.

[How the collection was rediscovered and saved from being broken up.]

The collection contains (by my count) 6,139 specimens of 411 species, almost all retaining labels listing the original collector, date and where taken. The dates range from 1899 to 1959. The moths are housed in three mahogany 20-drawer pillar chests with oak detachable locking bars by Watkins and Doncaster, fitted to sit together as one.

In the drawers are many items of personal significance to Classey: one of his original August 1950 Burren Greens; the famous joint-exhibit (with H.S. Robinson) in the South London Entomological and Natural History Society Exhibition of October 1950 at which Classey showed his Burren Greens; a series of Diursia florida (both new additions to the British list); a series of C. sponsa bred from a female at Ham Street, Kent, markedly different from the New Forest form; and Robinson showed a series of moths taken by his new Mercury Vapour Moth Trap. This single drawer thus commemorates three historic firsts.

The exhibit drawer (3:19) is now empty apart from the original labels, which correspond in every detail to the description given in the Society’s Proceedings. After the exhibition some specimens were donated to the Society and to other entomologists, but most of the moths in the exhibit appear to have returned to their homes in the collection, where all but a few of them may still be found.

During his career Eric Classey must have put together hundreds of exhibits in drawers like this. Of all of them he kept this one and its labels and most of its contents. See Bringing Classey & Robinson’s historic exhibit back to life for a reconstruction of the original exhibit from specimens currently in the collection.

Follow the links below for a full list of species, drawer by drawer, accompanied by photographs of each drawer (click to enlarge). The Burren Green specimen is in 2:19.

• •CABINET ONE • CABINET TWO • CABINET THREE