Forgotten moths fly back into the limelight

Another Life: The CDs swinging in our apple trees offer a dozen mirrors to the sun. They flash rainbows around the garden, intended to worry raiding blackbirds, but I am the one they mesmerise, their shimmering festivity a new signal of September, like the glitter of dewy cobwebs or the wheeling of migrant swallows.

Next it will be moths in the bathroom, butting the bulb in a frenzy of infra-red misperception. The big furry ones used to put me in a panic as a child, but now I stalk them with cupped hands, hoping for a glimpse of wing-markings in a handy jam jar. Experiments a while ago with a borrowed mercury vapour light trap presented an overnight avalanche of temporary captives and thus an instant choice between casual interest and total addiction. I settled for an occasional handful from the teeming world of the night.

Unlike our 30-odd butterflies, there are hundreds of "macro" moths and tiny-winged microlepidoptera. Faced with pages (or computer screens) of the noctuid family, for example, with their stout, stubby bodies and wings designed for camouflage, one's heart can quail. But, peered at one at a time, they are all beautiful, their intricate geometry and sombre opulence of colour a lifetime's inspiration for any fabric designer. Even the filmy browns and greys of the Clouded Drab would look great on the right sort of blonde.

The history of moth collectors has sometimes been a story of obsession.

But the Victorians who smeared tree trunks at dusk with brown sugar and beer ("sugaring" was a standard technique before the light-trap) also devised intriguing "common" names for their captives: Feathered Gothic, Powdered Quaker, Neglected Rustic, Ruddy Highflyer, and so on.

In such company, the Confused and Pretty Pinion are just two more names for conjecture, but they happen to be among the newer records for Co Donegal and also "species of conservation concern in Northern Ireland". The Red-Necked Footman, on the other hand, a moth of conifers once thought to be rare in the county, "is now turning up abundantly almost wherever we look". All of this comes from Ralph Sheppard, Donegal's devoted naturalist and prime mover in the Donegal Biodiversity Project.

Since that buzzword "biodiversity" began to creep into our strategies for land use, the neglect of the role of insects has become more and more apparent. As Sheppard stresses in an excellent brochure for the project, Mapping the Moths of Donegal, nearly all the habitat guidance for planning is based on birds and flowers - it quite ignores what is by far the most abundant, complex and important part of wildlife. Moths are only a fraction of the insect world, but the links between their caterpillars and specific habitats, trees and plants make them a flagship group for study, identifying biodiversity "hot spots" and revealing more about the needs of insects in general.

Donegal probably has about 400 different moth species, and the 12,000 or more records so far amassed by the project's volunteers - school groups included - have discovered most of them. Their pictures, often digital images e-mailed for identification, appear on the project's website, www.skylark.ie/donegalmoths. Its distribution maps, along with butterfly surveys co-ordinated by Dublin's Bob Aldwell, will help to shape priorities in the county's heritage plan.

When it comes to learning more about the island's insects, Donegal has some outstandingly energetic and effective scientific neighbours in Northern Ireland (try www.habitas.org.uk and www.irishmoths.fsnet.co.uk). One of them, much to Ireland's good fortune, also happens to be a world-class nature photographer.

Robert Thompson of Banbridge, Co Down, has already bowled people over with the beauty of his work in such books as the Ulster Museum's mammoth Natural History of Ireland's Dragonflies. Now, in Close-up and Macro: a Photographer's Guide (David & Charles, £22.50), he encourages others to follow in his patient footsteps.

A technical whiz, working mostly on medium-format film, but also now with digital cameras, Thompson is a master of the exquisite close-up - whether of moths, woodland flowers, fungi, lichens, frosted leaves and umbellifer plants. Some 200 photographs demonstrate not only impeccable technique and rendering of light and texture, but the naturalist's field craft, which helps to put wildlife in the frame.

As a teenage camera buff who stalked the woods of Sussex with tripod and Voigtlander, and blacked out the back-garden greenhouse for a darkroom, this is a book that would have made any Christmas memorable.