HAVE YOU EVER rescued a moth? Have you ever caught one of those light-drunk whirligigs and saved him from a witless incandescent end, captured him between cradling palms and felt the tickling softness of his wings? You could crush him in a single absent-minded moment: a lovely thing in subtle night attire, gently and utterly vulnerable in your human hands. It only managed to survive in the too-human world because you willed it so. An emblem, if you like, of nature and the way we live in it.

And so yesterday to a morning’s mothing at Minsmere. Minsmere is the RSPB’s flagship nature reserve down the road from me in Suffolk, a place famous for birds, especially avocets. But one of life’s essential truths is that if a place is good for one kind of life, it is generally good for many others. Minsmere has recently recorded its thousandth species of butterflies and moths.

A thousand! You can, on a good day in May, see getting on for 100 species of bird at Minsmere. There are about 2,500 moths to be seen in this country: and Minsmere can now claim a stunning 1K-plus.

These include a Mediterranean moth never seen before in Britain, which has since been given the English-language name of Minsmere crimson underwing. The thousandth species, the many-lined moth, had not been seen in Britain since 1879. Minsmere is a place for any one who loves life, in whatever form it comes.

• THE BEST WAY to identify moths is to catch them, and the best way to do this is to set up a moth trap: a mercury-vapour bulb to entice them in, and loads of old egg-boxes for the moths to roost in safely.

  Then in the morning, you rummage through with careful fingers — not least because there was a hornet a good inch long lying in wait for clumsy entomologists.

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  Robin Harvey, as assistant warden at Minsmere, has been in charge of much of the project. “With a moth trap you never know quite what you are going to get,” he said. “It’s like getting a present every day.”

  And I was there for Friday morning’s great unwrapping. “Sorry you won’t be getting anything spectacular,” said David Fairhurst, who was running the trap that morning, Harvey being away in Spain. “Too late in the year for the big stuff.”

  It was inevitable, then, that just about the first moth to emerge was the amazing convolvulus hawk moth: a giant of a thing, a good three inches from nose to tail with, the mothmen say, a monkey’s face to be seen on its back. It makes sense. If you spend a lot of time staring at the cryptic markings of moths, you are highly likely to start hallucinating.

  There are so many moths. We had 26 species in the morning’s trove: autumnal rustic, red-green carpet, lesser yellow underwing, lilac beauty, small square-spot: a glorious array of subtly different creatures, each acquiring an individuality, a uniqueness, in the egg-box crowd of not-quite-the-samers.

  Then a real surprise: a small pale moth, lurking in his egg-box like a pale cylinder, ginger at one end. It was a four-spotted footman, the first time one had been seen on Minsmere, and only the second time one had been seen in Suffolk. They are migratory, and we found seven in the same trap: so it should be renamed the 49 bus moth. Won’t Robin be cross, we thought. And marched on into the morning.

• BUT FIRST I took a stroll around a chunk of the reserve: and the first thing I saw was one of the most dashing birds of prey in the world. Hobbies are rum things: if you think you’ve seen a hobby, then you know it was actually a kestrel. But if you know you’ve seen a hobby . . .

  And I knew all right, for all that it was the most fleeting glimpse: those long slim wings and the swift-like vibe of the thing. He was no doubt filling up with dragonflies, fuel for the long journey to Africa that lies ahead. And so I left a Minsmere teeming with life, and went back to the real world, a place in which butterflies and moths are in steep decline.

  There are two ways of looking at places like Minsmere. Either they are the last doomed islands of wild in a sea of too much civilisation; or they are the places from which the great fightback can be — is already being — launched. One sure thing: which ever way you look at it, the Minsmeres of this world are becoming more important with every passing day.

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