WPAS monthly meeting at the Macomb IL City Hall building in the community room on the first floor.
Program: "Moths After Dark" by Angella Moorehouse
Angella Moorehouse will give a talk on attracting moths and other night-time insects to get a better understanding of the diversity of our local forests and grasslands. Night lighting is the act of shining bright lights (often mercury vapor or black lights) onto a white sheet to amplify the light which serves as an attractant to night-flying insects. Angella has been night lighting at various locations weekly from May-October since 2020, sporadically for several years prior. It is not uncommon to observe 200 or more species of moths, flies, beetles, wasps, bugs, and other invertebrates in a 2-hour period. Night lighting is the quickest way, by far, to observe the most diversity of insects in a short period of time. One must stay out a bit longer and play the waiting game. Shine the lights and they will come.
Angella Moorehouse, Illinois Nature Preserves Commission
Angella Moorehouse holds a master’s degree from Western Illinois University in Macomb, Illinois. Her educational training is in avian and plant ecology. She was mentored in the field by various entomology experts starting with butterflies in the late 1990s. This passion later expanded to include other groups of insects with a focus on pollinators. For the past 29 years she has worked for the Illinois Department of Natural Resources as a field representative for the Illinois Nature Preserves Commission in west-central Illinois where she prepares conservation easements to protect high quality natural areas and assists in the management along with flora and fauna monitoring of these sites. She has been night lighting for 10 years and attempting to photograph and identify all the insects visiting the sheets. Angella has published 5 photo field guides for Moths of the Midwest through the Field Museum’s rapid field guide project. This guide includes over 500 species of moths. Her current list of moths photographed and identified is approaching 1,000. She has also been conducting photography surveys of flower visiting insects on 30 protected natural areas in west-central Illinois since 2018. Those efforts were used to produced additional photo guides for wasps, bees, flies along with a book, “Flower Bugs”, a field guide for identification of flower visiting true bugs (Heteroptera) in the Midwest.
Also check out other Meetups in Macomb, Workshops in Macomb.
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