Extinction by collecting an example.

[Neil Jones]

This is an example of an extinction by collecting. It is the British day-flying
moth the New Forest Burnet. Zygaena viciae ytenensis.

Z. v. ytenensis was last recorded definitively in the New Forest in 1927 by
W. Fassnidge at Wood Fidley, though there is an unconfirmed report from
1947.   A photograph of the Wood Fidley location taken in
1966 nearly 40 years after the last record of the moth shows it still to be
an open, flowery area. The kind of habitat the moth needs.

In 1899 the great British collector J. W. Tutt noted that the species was
collected so systematically by professional dealers and collectors that in
some years it was very rare indeed.  The species was reported as "gradually
going" in 1903.  In 1907 a collector called R.E. James stated that the
species could scarcely hold its own were not its headquarters on private
ground.  Collectors took stragglers outside this area and James mentions one
"professional" (probably a dealer) who lived there for a week and took 600
specimens.

In 1926  the collector T.H.L. Grosvenor in his address to the South London
Entomological and Natural History Society referred to the precarious state of
the species stating that because it was sluggish and easily seen a single 
collector intent  on taking large numbers could easily exterminate it.  
At the same period the collector A.E. Burras made a morning visit to one of 
the moth's locations and found over a dozen collectors already there.  They 
had divided the area between them and were methodically working each plot by 
walking up and down waiting for the moths to emerge.  Burras was so disgusted
he returned home empty handed.

In 1932 the collector  B. H. Cooke searched for the species in what were its 
known haunts but found no examples.  He understood it had been practically 
exterminated by over-collecting on the part of certain dealers a few years 
previously, these dealers having apparently "... sat around day after day 
watching for the insects to hatch out and walk into their nets".

The collector S. G. Castle Russell, writing in 1942 said that there seemed to
 be little doubt that the moth had been exterminated by over-collecting in the New
Forest and referred to a dealer who sat on the ground each day during the
emergence and took every specimen that came out. Later, in 1951, he wrote that
through its persecution by collectors and dealers for years, it inevitably
became extinct.

R. F. Bretherton, another eminent collector commented in 1951
"if it is now completely gone, this seems to be a clear case of the
destruction of an ancient species by the hand of man".  Yet another
internationally eminent entomologist and collector E.B. Ford blamed
it on the "inexcusable avarice of collectors".



-- 
Neil Jones- Neil at nwjones.demon.co.uk http://www.nwjones.demon.co.uk/
"At some point I had to stand up and be counted. Who speaks for the
butterflies?" Andrew Lees - The quotation on his memorial at Crymlyn Bog
National Nature Reserve


 
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