Mike Ridge

It is with great sadness that we offer our condolences to the family of former Moth Group stalwart Mike Ridge, who died on 20th October in Lyme Regis. Mike undertook many moth nights throughout the county, mainly with Robin Clatworthy.

An obituary will be included in the next edition of the Newsletter, due to be published in January.

Launch of new Somerset Moth Group website

We are pleased to announce that our brand new Somerset Moths website is now live and available to access. It has taken a little while to get off the ground but we hope you find it valuable.

The website’s purpose is to document the moths of the two Vice Counties into which Somerset is divided, VC5 (South Somerset) and VC6 (North Somerset), with good quality photographs, distribution maps, phenology patterns and more.

The site is pretty much self-explanatory. It has:

- the facility to post latest sightings, with photos if required;

- the ability to browse by family or by the species most likely to be on the wing at certain times of the month;

- information on submitting data;

- individual species accounts, with photos, improved distribution maps and phenology and reporting rate charts (enabling you to see flight times and how many records were submitted in each year);

- links on the Home page to the Group’s Twitter account and Somerset Butterflies & Moths Facebook account; and

- the ability for us to post news and details of events.

The maps have data up to and including 2020. Records for 2021 will be added later in the year once all records have been processed and verified.

As you will see, we have been able to upload many high quality photos but there are still gaps, either for an adult of a species, leaf-mine or larvae. If you have a good quality image that you think might be suitable, please email it somersetmothgroup@gmail.com.

One departure from the old website is the process for submitting sightings. To keep the site as secure and accurate as possible, we are not issuing passwords to Members to access the site. Once an entry has been submitted, it will be uploaded to the site in due course.

As part of ongoing development of the site, we are hoping to add more statistical information in the future.

We owe a great deal of thanks to Alex Perry for designing the new website, development of which has gone very smoothly. I’d also like to thank the rest of the Moth Group Committee for their help in the development of the website and everyone who has uploaded photos.

If you are not a member of the Somerset Moth Group, please join us to help with running costs and receive our twice yearly Newsletter with lots of information about moths and mothing in Somerset. For details of membership, go to https://www.somersetmoths.org/about

We hope you enjoy the site!