Letter from the President...

Dear Lepsoc Members

Since last year, when we presented 'Vision 2020' to the Conference, you may be thinking 'what's actually happening'. A lot's been going on behind the scenes, so here are some pointers as to what the future holds. This will go into the next Lepsoc e-news as well as Metamorphosis so everyone has a chance to read it.

Firstly, if any of you are NOT receiving the e-newsletter, it means we have the wrong or no e-mail address and we need to fix this. So if this is the case please e-mail me at steve.woodhall@sos.co.za, with your current e-mail address.

The world of Lepidopterists post SABCA. This brilliant collaboration between Lepsoc, ADU and SANBI comes to its conclusion this month. Soon, every butterfly's conservation status will be known – and we will have a base for planning ways to prevent our rarest ones disappearing. These plans will require funding on a level we have never operated at before.

We have created a corps of Custodians of Critically Endangered Butterflies. Their first task is to take the conservation assessment that will be published in the SABCA document, and use it as a base for planning the next steps. This will probably begin with monitoring and ecological study. The Custodians will need funds to do this. We need to foster a route for universities to gain NRF (National Research Foundation) funding for students embarking on research on these butterflies' conservation, among other objectives. And we may eventually have to find the money to buy land, promote interest in these rare species in the mass media, to secure their future.

Lepibase/Lepidops will go online, and in a manner still under discussion, share portals with the Virtual Museum. The scope will widen to include moths. We plan also to carry on with the Butterfly Censuses. This will also need funding, as running and promoting such a website and system is expensive. Feelers have already been put out to potential large corporate funders.

Membership. The vision is to grow Lepsoc into a Society with real clout, and that means membership in the thousands, not hundreds. Without abandoning our core of collectors and serious lepidopterists, we need to get the nature-loving public as involved as they are in other organisations such as BirdLife and the Botanical Society. Our current membership is just too small to do all the things we need to do going forward. So we created the new category of e-member, alongside the birth of our website. We need the income from a large membership base to succeed in our conservation plans. But how do we do this?

Communication. Metamorphosis has always been our Journal, and our main way of communicating with you. Everyone loves it, and we have been very wary of changing it. But we believe we have no choice but to change. It has been costing us almost all our membership income to engage with our membership - and no-one else. It doesn't reach the vast sea of potential members out there. Printing costs are going through the roof, leaving nothing to spend on activities and conservsations. And, it has been proving more and more difficult to source material for Metamorphosis. As it currently stands, university academics publishing in Metamorphosis cannot access funding.

So the plan is to take Metamorphosis online, and make it an NRF-accredited journal so that NRF-sponsored university research can be published and the researchers get access to NRF funding. It will no longer be published regularly, but whenever a paper is published. Members will of course get the latest Metamorphosis e-mailed to them.

The newsletter is part of our new communications platform, and Yolande Bode is doing a fantastic job of editing it. It's a digest of all the Forum posts from the previous month, with her own special magic added. It's YOUR publication – if you post on the Forums, your input will be covered.

We realise that not all members have e-mail. We will make a plan to print out and mail Metamorphosis and a selection of e-newsletters to these members.

We know that part of the charm of being in Lepsoc is that A5 envelope dropping on the doormat, and with all this e-publication going on, are we going to lose that? Well the answer is no. For the year of the changeover, we have funding from an anonymous donor to purchase space in Environment magazine. Edited by Dr. John Ledger, it is a collaboration of seven of SA's Environmental NGO's. Lepsoc is at present a contributor only but as our membership grows we hope to become a full partner. The magazine has a circulation of over 16000, so it allows us to reach a readership with proven interest in conservation – all of them potential Lepsoc members.

Metamorphosis as we know it will not suddenly disappear. As it morphs into its new form, we will free up funds to carry on with Environment magazine and we hope, take up more pages and become a full member. So for a while, both Metamorphosis and Environment magazine will drop on your doormat!

We will have one page to publish our news, and this will be focused on attracting new members and reporting on our activities. But that's not all – we will be able to publish free of charge, illustrated articles on butterflies and moths of general interest to the readership at large. I have already published one and I know there are others in the pipeline.

Dave McDermott, who is a professional freelance journalist, has agreed to take on the task of putting together our page. The deadline for copy for the spring issue, our first – is 30 April. Please send him material you think is appropriate, to dave@copywise.co.za.

Finally, we are a democracy and we must continue to ensure that these changes are supported by you, our membership. To this end, we've put an online poll onto the Home page of the website. We hope you'll all support us in these new initiatives, which we passionately feel are needed to take Lepsoc Africa into the 21^st Century – and secure a safe future for African Lepidoptera, and our beloved hobby.

Thank you

Steve Woodhall

President – Lepidopterists' Society of Africa

Antique butterflies and news...

Raimund Schutte finally got himself a copy of Butterflies of South Africa by D.A. Swanepoel on Bid or Buy. Upon receiving his book, he came across an interesting news paper cutting from 1953 in the Cape Times. It is quite interesting reading material.

Places where butterfly collections are mostly preserved are in museums. Museums are always fascinating with lots of history and information, as you all know. In Gauteng, we have the Transvaal Museum with a very interesting collection of butterflies. Other countries, like the Seychells for example, also display butterflies as part of their country's history...

I also came across a website called Science Daily with very interesting atricles to read. One that caught my eye was an article about a new butterfly species that was discovered in the Natural History Museum's collection among a collection of almost three million butterfly species. What is more incredible, is that it has been there since 1920, but nobody has described it since it was brought to the museum...

Gauteng Branch News

The team of the Gauteng branch were busy in the months of February and March.

Here are a few places that was visited:

Zaagkuilsdrift - Limpopo
Highlands Wilderness - Limpopo

Edible "Tips"

This month I have decided to make one of my favourite salads - Green Island Salad. This is such a nice refreshing salad and can be made anytime of the year...

Groen_Eiland_Slaai

Support friends of Nature

BirdLife SA is an orginazation that has got the same goals and visions as LepSoc, and that is to conserve a small part of nature, namely the conservation of birds in South Africa. Here is a letter from Ernest Retief. Please support them in their quest...

Hi to all

It is important to BirdLife South Africa that as many people as possible know about the conservation work that the organization is involved in. BirdLife South Africa’s members receive a monthly e-newsletter (a PDF document) which describes this important work. The e-newsletter is very popular and we have received many positive comments.

It is forwarded to all our members whose email addresses are on our system and the attachment is about 1MB in size. For previous examples, please see: http://www.birdlife.org.za/page/5839/newsletter

However, we have now decided to make the e-newsletter available to as wide an audience as possible, even non-members of BirdLife South Africa! It is very easy to subscribe: just go to http://www.birdingroutes.co.za/forms/newsletter.html, enter your name and email address and press submit and you will be placed on the mailing list to receive future e-newsletters. As easy as that!

The e-newsletters are very interesting and informative and the next edition is due soon, so do not wait too long to register.

If you have any questions about this, you are more than welcome to contact me directly.

Ernst F Retief