My fascination with butterflies began at an early age according to my parents and sisters. Running after them in the garden of the house located near the “Farallones de Cali”, I called them “picho-ochas.” At the age of 12, I started my first collection together with my cousin Jaime Hurtado, with whom we invented colloquial names: “Dummy with tails”, “Black with hearts”, “Orange with stripes”, “Cafergaqui”, and many others. Back then, we built nets using metal clothes hangers and plastic bags. On weekends I would ask my father to take us to “Pance” or to the “Carretera al Mar” where I first saw the “Morpho” butterfly that became an obsession and for which we 'leaped out' from the moving vehicle every time we saw one. The "daddy stop" was constant as were my father's scoldings.
In 1974, I visited the Pharomachrus Flora and Fauna Sanctuary for a week, today Munchique National Park, where I was amazed by the Morpho sulkowskyi. There were many races behind them trying to capture one. I also discovered that the place where we relieved ourselves was great for attracting several species of Nymphalidae. Furthermore, one day a group of europeans came to the place to hunt for butterflies with "professional" nets that I managed to observe well to make one in Cali. My mother was in charge of getting the fabric and sewing the bag. Then we used a thick wire for the hoop that we attached to a broomstick.
At the age of 15, I visited Alto Anchicayá for a weekend and the first night I was surprised by the impressive number of moths that came to the light sources of the station known as Yatacué. That day I began to collect moths and visit Alto Anchicaya frequently. I was fortunate to meet Hans Dahners, a German professor at the Universidad del Valle, who had a very large collection of diurnal and nocturnal butterflies that today are part of the Entomology Museum of said University. Every time I saw a specimen in his collection that interested me, he told me that he had captured it in Alto Anchicayá. When I told him that I had not seen it, he responded that this species only came out at 2 or 3 in the morning. Thus, I began to use an alarm clock to be able to capture specimens that, as Hans mentioned, only came out after midnight.
Given my interest also in hummingbird and bird photography, I made the decision to abandon the butterfly collection at that time. One of the reasons was not having lepidopteran identification books but I did have access to a Bird of Colombia by Rudolph Meyer de Schauensee (1964). Years later and since my collection occupied a room in my parents' house, I donated it to the Cali Zoo. Forty-five years after starting to collect moths I met them again at the MPNR. After taking some photos of them for several years and inspired by Rodrigo Bernal's recent book publication, Moths of Colombia, I decided to make a year and a half effort to try to record the greatest number of species at the reserve station.
I believe there are over 2000 species photographed so far that I have organized by family in PDF files. Although I am in the process of identifying the species in order to generate more complete information —which may take some time— for now I want to share their files in alphabetical order through the following links of 20 families. If any enthusiasts or experts find a mistake, please send me a message: lamh@bioconservancy.org
DEPRESSARIIDAE-TORTRICIDAE https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Efs_zH6dzAyOR5BUciQrLOhXocwg7-Ug/view?usp=sharing
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