- I found caterpillars, that was my first interest.
As a school boy,
my mother wrote a letter to my father,
and she said, "Paul is studying a caterpillar
on the kitchen table."
And she described it. And I now know from that description
that it had to be only one species of moth in this country,
the Pale Tussock.
I was two and three quarter years old.
- Many people are very sceptical of moths.
Many people are very afraid of moths
and have a genuine fear of them.
- People have this preconception
that moths are small brown animals
that just eat your woollen clothes
that you have in your cupboard.
- People think, a butterfly is brightly coloured,
moths, drab and brown.
It's not the case that the moths are just the drab ones.
- They can be pink, orange.
So things like Tiger Moths, Elephant Hawk-moths,
The Shark, so they've got very cool names.
And I think people are often very surprised
the first time, for instance, that they go moth trapping
that actually you get this, such huge variety
of different colours and patterns and shapes.
- In Britain,
we have about two and a half thousand species
of butterflies and moths.
Taking them all together, they're in a group
that the scientists have labelled the Lepidoptera.
It's a long word, but it's broken down into two words.
Lepido and ptera.
We know about pterodactyls.
Pteron means wing.
Lepidos is a Greek work for tile, like a roof tile.
And a butterfly or a moth have scales on the wings.
That powder that rubs off when you touch them,
if you handle them carelessly.
And that powder is the scales from the wings.
If you look at them with a microscope,
they're all arranged in rows.
They really do look like the tiles on a roof.
Hence tiled-winged insects.
- We do get people that are upset about
the sheer number of insects that are pinned.
- [Cartoon] Marvellous. Magnificent.
Rare specimens of the flipus flapus
and flapus polapus.
- We're really not pinning that many insects,
we're normally pinning an individual
and it will be used for science, that's the thing.
It's very difficult to tell from a photograph
everything you need to know about an insect.
- [Archive] Look what Susan's taking out of that box,
and look what's on it.
A caterpillar is a growing upstage
in the life of a moth or butterfly.
- Traditionally, caterpillars have been kept
for collections and also for show
by drying them out like a balloon.
And it's quite an unusual process.
They would use this amazing apparatus.
It's very, very simple.
There's an oil lamp that went underneath,
a little burner,
and then you have this long lead here, hollow tube.
And the glass end here would be inserted
in the little hole at the end of the caterpillar.
And then you would actually blow on this bit,
keep a very gentle, constant stream,
trying to talk with it in my mouth,
and then you would twist it.
And that way, the caterpillar would be expanded
and actually dry in the hot air.
We don't tend to do it now
because we like to keep the specimens,
what we call, wet,
which is meaning we're keeping them in alcohol.
To keep something wet and keep its body parts inside
is actually more important to us now
than blowing them up.
But it's a rather fun and different way
of keeping something indefinitely.
- [Interviewer] Have you ever tried?
- I tried once and it didn't work very well
for neither me or the caterpillar.
- About 60% of the UK moths are actually
specialised in broadleaf woodland,
or need broadleaf woodland habitats
for some stage of their lifecycle.
So, broadleaf woodlands like Wytham Woods
are very important habitats for a lot of the UK's moths.
What we were looking at in our research in Wytham
was how moths were affected
by fragmentation of the woodlands.
Our main finding was that woodland moths
can actually move quite large distances,
but because they're restricted to woodlands,
because they need woodland for feeding,
either as larvae or as adults,
that they needed these very big areas of woodland.
So they couldn't really survive in very small fragments
and they also needed hedge rows to connect woodlands
up if they were going to move across the landscape.
- If those plants aren't here for any reason,
then the species of moths will disappear.
- The caterpillar stage is a massive food source stage
for most of our birds.
Caterpillars are eating the plants,
which allows more light to get through
for other plants to compete.
With the moths flying at night,
they're actually one of our biggest pollinators.
Moths are superb animals,
they really are beautiful, beautiful creatures,
so important and absolutely stunning.