William Evans’ Collection

If you had some space to display a small selection of moths from your local area, which species would you choose? The most colourful? Your favourites? The commonest?

Following a brief visit last year which I documented in a previous blog, I recently had the pleasure to spend some more time exploring eight drawers of 100 year old pinned butterflies and moths in a private collection near where I live. The specimens themselves had been collected by William Evans (1851-1922), an accomplished naturalist and respected friend and colleague of Alice Balfour. Retiring from work early due to ill health, William Evans spent several decades exploring the Forth region of Scotland and amassed a huge natural history collection most of which is now safely curated in Edinburgh at the National Museum of Scotland. The drawers I looked at contain just a small selection of his butterflies and moths which would have been put together by his son William Edgar Evans (1882 – 1963), probably after his father had passed away. They were kept at a property William Edgar owned on the East Lothian coast where groups of scouts from Edinburgh would spend time exploring and learning about the outdoors. Although nobody knows for sure, it seems likely that the specimens were used to inspire the boys, showcasing the diversity of butterflies and moths that could be found in East Lothian.

Exploring the moths

As I worked my way through the drawers – two of butterflies and six of moths – I found mistakes and I wondered if the accuracy of the naming and provenance of species might have been of secondary concern to that of creating an interesting display. William Edgar Evans was an all-round naturalist but his expertise was botany. As a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh and with a job at the Royal Botanic Gardens he could have sought help from friends or colleagues to make sure his labelling was accurate but maybe this collection of butterflies and moths was not meant for a specialist audience. The rest of his father’s collection would have been more than enough to keep the expert entomologists in Edinburgh happy; here was just a small hand-picked selection to ignite wonder in young people. I’m sure he would never have envisaged that nearly 60 years after his death, a local moth enthusiast would be poring over it and spotting mistakes!

Of course I might be being unfair on William Edgar Evans. The collection could have been meddled with or altered since he originally put it together. Maybe some of the original specimens have been moved to another collection and replaced with approximately similar species. There is much I don’t know. My interest was not to cast judgement but rather to find out more about the specimens themselves – where they came from and when they were caught. Historic collections can contain a wealth of information about the former distributions of butterflies and moths, and when added to our modern-day databases this information can improve our understanding of how populations are changing over time. Whilst the specimens exist it seems a waste not to use the data from them. Details are written on tiny labels positioned on the pin below the specimen and to read it the pin and specimen usually needs to be carefully lifted out of the drawer. Handling old specimens in this way is a delicate business to be minimised, but it gave me the opportunity to examine the moths and repair any damage at the same time.

_{Cocoon, Righead Moss nr Avonbridge Linlithgowshire 11.9.15 Hatched} _18.5.16

Repair of specimens

Most of the specimens were caught in the late 1800s and have been kept in a cabinet in a house by the sea for more than 60 years without any particular care or attention, yet they are in amazingly good condition. There were a few loose wings and abdomens that I was able to repatriate, with the help of PVA glue, to their body but unfortunately various fragments of legs and antennae couldn’t be matched with any confidence.

Many pins had verdigris, a green crusty deposit formed by a reaction with of copper in the pin. I didn’t want to get into replacing pins so made do with carefully scraping as much off as I could. A few specimens had whitish deposits on their wings, possibly originating from the small sachets of chemicals placed in each drawer to prevent fungal and pest damage. I gently brushed away what I could, but not wanting to damage specimens further I didn’t manage to remove it all.

_{Left before, right after some crystalline deposits had been removed from a Brindled Ochre}

Finally I made a thorough search for signs of pests. Small black thrips had managed to get into some of the drawers at some stage. Although they wouldn’t damage the specimens it did demonstrate that the lids weren’t particularly tight-fitting – what else could get in? A few moths and beetles have larvae that feed on and can devastate insect collections. I found one long-dead spider beetle (Ptinus tectus), and two long dead clothes moths (Tinea bisselliella). Thankfully no obvious damage had been done and there was no sign of any current infestation.

I replaced the old sachets of chemical preservatives in each drawer, long past their best before date, with some modern lavender oil equivalents (the preserving chemicals of old are now deemed too unsafe for general use), brushed away all loose debris from the bottom of the drawer and my curating task was done.

Documenting specimens

Some of the species sitting in the drawers labelled “Selection of East Lothian moths” were intriguing as they would be new and surprising records for the region. Frustratingly none of them have details of where they came from and without any written proof of origin we will never know. However most of these ‘exotic’ species share the same writing on their label. I can’t decipher it fully but this does suggest they came from a common source – perhaps a breeder or another collection – and adds doubt that they were of wild Scottish origin.

There were 273 moths with sufficient location and date detail on their label to be added to the National Moth Recording Scheme. With the exception of the Goat Moth (see drawer 2) most are fairly common species. Although their details won’t add much to our existing knowledge of moth distributions 100 years ago, the information does fill in a few gaps and helps confirm written records. William Evans frequently published notes in the Scottish Naturalist and some of the specimens in these drawers are referred to in these articles. Not only is it nice to see the actual specimens he writes about and read more details about their capture, matching a specimen to a publication gives confidence that his written records are correct and makes it worth extracting such information for the National Moth Recording Scheme even when no supporting specimen is available.

More details of some of the specimens can be found in the drawer by drawer links at the end of this blog.

So, what next? The drawers have now been returned to their cabinet in their house by the sea. Various youth groups still use the property, taking part in a range of outdoor activities during their stay. I hope to do some light trapping with these groups, discovering the moths that are living in the area now and maybe inspiring a new generation of naturalists. The pinned collection can be used at the same time, not only to illustrate how the variety of moths may have changed in the last 100 years, but also to show how the way we record them and what we do with the information collected has changed.