BAMONA's blog

The Pollinator Partnership is looking to hire a motivated and detail-oriented Monarch Habitat Coordinator for the Eastern Broadleaf Forest Region. The Monarch Habitat Coordinator will provide programmatic support for Monarch Wings Across Eastern Broadleaf Forest, a collaborative monarch habitat initiative with numerous partners across a 5 state region.

MWAEBF is a multi-component project to address the alarming decline in monarchs and the fragmentation of the annual migration through seed collection, technical training, and long-term habitat establishment.

In late June and early July 2017, about 200 adult Dakota skippers were released on The Nature Conservancy’s (TNC) Hole-in-the-Mountain Preserve in an attempt to reestablish a population on this site.

The Nature Conservancy recently released a video and a blog post describing the release and the science supporting the reintroduction.

We have streamlined the process for reporting suspected misidentified sightings. On each sighting record page, logged in users will see an option to flag the sighting as misidentified. A justification must be provided to support the claim, and an automatic email alert will be sent to the coordinator.

Please use care when flagging misidentified sightings.

If you wish to support additional new features on this site, please consider making a donation.

Butterfly Conservation's Eighth International Symposium is to be held at Southampton University, from the 6th to 8th April 2018 on the theme: The ecology and conservation of butterflies and moths.

If you missed it in past years, plan to get involved this year!

Getting involved is easy: attend a National Moth Night event, start an event, join friends and neighbors to check porch lights from time to time, set up a light and see what is in your own backyard, or read literature about moths, etc. Visit the National Moth Week website for more information, or learn how to register.

If you take part in National Moth Week, you can provide your data to us. Take photographs of the moths you find, and come share your sightings with BAMONA. You will need to register for an account, but it is quick and easy to do, and logged in users can track their submissions. Simply take a photograph of a moth, and submit that information to us via our online submission form. Make sure to select "National Moth Week" under the list of Partner Projects.

We'll add the verified records to the database, maps, and checklists, and your data will become part of a growing dataset. To see the records that have been verified so far, visit the National Moth Week Data Explorer.

We are temporarily disabling the county map layer on species range maps. The map layer was very costly to maintain. We are working on developing an improved solution but it will take time and developer resources. If this feature is valuable to you please consider making a financial contribution.

Pollinator Week 2017 marks the tenth consecutive year of uniting the nation around the critically important issue of pollinator conservation. Pollinator Partnership (P2), which created and has administered Pollinator Week since its inception, announced that ALL 50 state governors (and many mayors), as well as the U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue and the U.S. Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke, have authorized proclamations supporting the national observance of Pollinator Week.

The Banded Orange Heliconian (Dryadula phaetusa) has been recorded in Eddy County, New Mexico. This subtropical species typically ranges from Brazil through Central America to central Mexico. Check out the verified sighting for details.

The 2017 Meeting of the Lepidopterists' Society will be held July 30-August 1 at the University of Arizona. Visit the website for more information: https://www.lepsoc.org/content/annual-meeting.

We are continuing our furious development pace as we work on the next version of the BAMONA website and underlying database. This enormous endeavor involves thousands of hours of unpaid work. The result will be an entirely responsive version of the BAMONA website, including the sighting submission and review process. We look forward to unveiling the new system and introducing users to new features.

Because two of us handle all of the development work on top of other project duties, communications via email have been slow. Sorry for the inconvenience! We are focusing on getting the system ready for a stable launch, and then we will dig out of emails.

If you like what we do and want to show your thanks, please consider making a contribution to our PayPal account: https://www.paypal.me/BAMONA.