A bit of history

My name is Mike Wall (that's me on the right, at a Butterfly Conservation event back in 2006), and I live in Basingstoke, Hampshire. I've always been keenly interested in natural history, and have been birding since a small lad. However, my interest in moths didn't start seriously until I attended a public mothing session in 2002. After that night when I was amazed by the variety of species on show, I soon got my own trap and have never looked back. In 2009 I took on the role of county micro-moth recorder to share some of the burden with Tim Norriss, as thanks to the burgeoning interest in moth recording in our county, the amount of data we now have to handle was too much for one person.

Tim Norriss resigned as CMR in 2015, after which I've accepted sole responsibility for maintaining the Hampshire moth database.

With record volumes running at over 100,000 per annum, it is a significant administrative burden and in 2025, going forward, I'm looking at ways of sharing this wider, news of which will be delivered shortly.

Hantsmoths

I setup Hantsmoths in October 2005 (building on work started in an earlier and now defunct website, www.bike2nature.co.uk) to provide an information portal for the county's moth-ers, and to give my burgeoning digital photo collection a home! It has gone from strength to strength and traffic is increasing on a year-on-year basis. After a number of overhauls, Pete Eeles come onboard in 2024 to restructure the underlying architecture and make administration 100% easier.

Isle of Wight moth records

In 2015, Iain Outlaw agreed to take on the role of Isle of Wight recorder, since when recording on the island has since gone from strength to strength. Iain had to step back in 2020 with Jim Baldwin taking over the reins. Jim sadly passed away in 2025, and Iain has agreed to take over the role, but this will take time to bed in. Iain can be contacted by email on iwmoths AT gmail DOT com. If you have both Hampshire and Isle of Wight records, you can send them to me and I will forward on.

Annual Report

Since 2020, I have been producing an annual report, which can be found in the drop down menu at the top of every webpage. For inclusion, please try and send in your records by the first quarter of the next year, and I generally aim to have the report completed by November (yep, it's a long time, but there's a lot of data to wade through and I have a life :)

I hope you enjoy the website and find it useful. Any errors or omissions should be notified to me at the email address below.