Last week I went on my first true collection trip with Istvan Miko and his boys. It was a long week, it was a tiring week, and it was a very hot week. But it was amazing to see a whole new array of insects along with some I recognize from up here in PA. We would go collect in the day in various habitats around Virginia and North Carolina then swim in the Atlantic to cool off before coming home to sort. While the main objective of the trip was Ceraphronoidea, we didn’t shy away from collecting everything from Odonates to Lepidopterans, and a few more antlions for my tank back home.
We started our journey on Sunday morning heading down towards Gatesville, NC our base of operations for the week. It was a long drive, part of which I got to experience the soul crushing nature of I-95, which I was regularly reminded by Istvan as being, “the busiest road on earth.” Eventually we reached our destination though, along the way I got a crash course in Hungarian party music which I am still whistling to myself a week later.
The game plan for the week was to do a triangle root around the Great Dismal Swamp with the three corners being Gatesville, Outer Banks, and Virginia Beach. We would lay pan traps and malaise traps the first two days on our stretches then collect the last 2 days, finish up some off-the-path pan traps on Friday and head home that night. Our end points of the day were always the beach to try and kill off the inevitable ticks and sweat from the swamps.
I also got to experience my first bout of light trapping at night which may have been my favorite portion of the trip since I really like moths and caught my fair share each night.
It should be stated that our yellow pan trapping throughout the day could not have gone as smoothly without the great assistance of Isti and Zalan, who double dutied as both the soap and water pourers and our primary source of Odonates on the trip. Both having proven that a dragonfly can indeed be caught with ones bare hands.
The swamps were absolutely beautiful in a sort of murky forgotten land kind of way. and depending on which side you were on you could collect antlions in a literal desert, or on the other side what I can only assume to be an evil mosquito and tick refuge.
The trip all in all went fairly smoothly, we did lose over 100 yellow pan traps to a tractor at one of our collection points but these things are to be expected, and it makes a good story. From what we saw while sorting there, Im very excited to continue our sorting of a few other locations and see what else we managed to catch. Couldn’t have asked for a better group than the 3 Miko’s. I learned quite a bit from this trip, from collection methods to insect identification. This was a solid end to the summer.