Event

Steve Hall led a public moth night at Parker Preserve in association with the NC Botanical Garden. Pictured below is a selection of the more than 90 species of moths that were photographed on the sheets by David George, Stephen Dunn, and Jeff Niznik.

Last Saturday, the Museum of Life and Science, in partnership with the Ellerbe Creek Watershed Association, hosted a public moth night on the museum grounds. I helped to organize this event, and was joined by NCBP members Carol Tingley and Tom Howard. The event was in conjunction with the 2023 Durham BioBlitz, and attendees were encouraged to submit their sightings through iNaturalist.

In the 1920s and 30s, Bentley Fulton, NC State University's renowned orthopterist, made a number of collecting trips to Carolina Beach, capturing, among other things, three crickets that would later become the type specimens for the Salt-Marsh Ground Cricket (Allonemobius sparsalsus), Beach Trig (Anaxipha litarena) and

After a late afternoon thunderstorm cleared out around 6:00 pm, we were able to hold a Moth Night down in the Piedmont Trails section of the North Carolina Botanical Garden, with 16 people in attendance. Sheets and blacklights were set up at two locations in the floodplain of Meeting-of-the-Waters Creek, with banana bait painted along the trail leading down to the sheets. Despite the preceding heavy rain and still dripping conditions, we recorded 36 species of moths, four crickets and katydids, two mantispids, one dobsonfly, and a Brown Prionus Beetle.

A bioblitz, organized by Ed Corey, was conducted at Pilot Mountain State Park on the 17th and 18th of May, involving day-long surveys of fish, herps, odonates, butterflies, moths, and other taxonomic groups.