The night is teeming with life. During the day there are about fifty species of butterflies flying, at night there are as many as 3,000! Of course North Holland will be there when Edo Goverse sets up his butterfly trap at the Rust en Vreugd garden park in North Amsterdam. Soon it is swarming with moths. From very small ones, the micros, to the gigantic privet pintail that is as big as a bird.
It works simply: you put a very large lamp on a sheet and then they come: moths in all shapes and sizes. We had no idea there was so much fluttering around at night. That’s why bats hunt in the dark!
Within an hour there are already countless bugs on the sheet. “We don’t really know exactly why they approach the light,” explains Edo Goverse. He is doing this moth inventory to keep track of how moths are doing in North Holland.
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Like all other insects, moths don’t fare too well either. Edo: “There are still many species, but I catch fewer specimens than before. For example, then I came across ten of a certain species, now only one or two.” Some species are fine. I ended up catching about 7,000 of the stipple moth.”
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Around 1:00 am a big whopper comes flying in. It looks like a bat or a small bird. “Look, that’s the icing on the cake tonight: a privet pintail!” Just like the other butterflies, this giant, landed on the white sheet, remains calm.
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At about 2:00 am the lamp goes out. “We leave the sheet for a while so that all the butterflies have time to fly away. Soon we will very carefully shake off the stragglers and then we will all go home again. We go to bed and the butterflies go into the night in search of a mate or food.”