Foreward

Hello and welcome to what is hopefully the first in a series of books on the natural history and the culture in captivity of the UK’s butterflies and moths. We are also going to feature some of the rare migrants that the UK receives each year from Europe and maybe even a couple that never reach our shores. Nothing’s set in stone, we just need to see where the journey takes us.

I’ve read all the lepidoptera breeding books available and there isn’t any that feature species in enough detail for my liking. A couple of sentences isn’t thorough enough to cover a butterfly or moth in its entirety. So, with that being said, this series is hopefully going to cram as much information into each species chapter as possible, enabling the reader to familiarise themselves with the quirks and nuances of each individual butterfly or moth.

We hope you get as much pleasure from browsing this book as we did breeding the species, photographing them and putting it all together. It’s certainly been a labour of love.

I feel it is worth mentioning that we are not ‘experts’, we are just butterfly and moth enthusiasts so please bear with us if we get a detail wrong, though we have tried our best to dot all the I’s and cross all the T’s. And on a similar vein this book has been produced using language that everyone can understand, be it the absolute beginner or otherwise, so we have kept the Latin down to a minimum. It’s also worth mentioning that there might be the odd occasion where a detail on rearing is repeated, it’s just one of those things, so please forgive us.