Many moths are as colourful as their butterfly cousins and some, like butterflies, are equally happy to fly during the day.

However, just as with the butterflies, things are not going well for moths and there have been huge declines for many kinds and conservation action is needed.

This can only happen if we understand more about where the different moths live and what sort of environments and habitats suit each species, which was why Butterfly Conservation is running a nationwide count recording all the larger UK moths and last week’s count was part of it.

We have also just started a special survey across the Borders this summer. My wife Barbara and I live in Eyemouth. We look at what we see along the coast and we found there appears to be a real shortage of cinnabar moths. We decided to ask people whether they had seen them. Coincidentally, the cinnabar was included as a target species in the Moths Count week.

Butterfly Conservation (through the Moths Count project) paid for us to print special postcards showing cinnabar caterpillars and moths, and they have been sent out to all schools, libraries, tourist information centres, wildlife centres and other places asking people to send in their sightings.

This can also be done online to barry@prater.myzen.co.uk. Southern readers may help as well.

The cinnabar is very brightly coloured. It flies by day and has equally-striking caterpillars which can be seen feeding voraciously on the leaves of ragwort plants during July and August. Sometimes they are so abundant that they strip the plants completely, leaving behind just bare stems.

Ragwort is known to be poisonous to horses, so horse owners and others try to eradicate the plant wherever horses or other grass-eating animals are kept.

When the cinnabar caterpillars eat the leaves, they store up the poison in their bodies, making them toxic to birds or other animals that would eat them and the conspicuous black and orange stripes on them are warning signs to this effect – ‘eat me at your peril’.

The cinnabar is relatively scarce in Scotland, occurring mostly in coastal areas where the climate is just that bit warmer, but as our climate changes we are perhaps seeing signs of a spread elsewhere and Butterfly Conservation is keen to track this development.

Another moth which was also targeted in the Garden Moths Count week was the peppered moth. Like the cinnabar, it has declined by more than half across the UK in the past 40 years.

The peppered moth is often considered to be a classic example of Darwin’s theory of natural selection. For much of the 20th century and earlier, the air in our towns and cities was dirty – visibly polluted with dust and soot. During this period, the Peppered Moth developed a very dark, almost black form, which allowed it to rest on polluted surfaces (such as trees and stonework) by day with little risk of being spotted by a hungry bird.