A well-known friend of nature has passed.

 You may or may not be familiar with Newport Forest. It is an area, formerly of mixed forest, steep creek systems, and former agricultural fields,adjacent to the Thames River in Elgin County and an extension of the Skunk's Misery Area of Natural and Scientific Interest. It is about 110 acres in area. It was acquired by Kee and Pat Dewdney in 2000. While Kee was a university professor who specialized in computer science and related subjects, and was on the faculty at Western as well as U of Waterloo, he and Pat always had a special interest in the natural world, which resulted in their purchase of this property.

I first met them in about 2000 as they assisted with part of the Ontario Breeding Bird Atlas in Chatham-Kent. I was invited to Newport Forest to enjoy the spectacular displays of Virginia Bluebells (Mertensia virginica), which was the first time I had seen this species in Ontario. It was almost overwhelming and of course I took a number of photos.

Over the years, I visited the Dewdneys at Newport Forest, and always came away amazed at the condition and diversity of the site as well as their absolute love and commitment to doing what was right for Newport. Kee had a passion for documenting as many different elements of the biota as he could. For example he would do net sweeps of the vegetation, trying to capture as many little creatures as possible. And over the years he would invite specialists that he knew to help document things in their area of specialty, which included the late Jane Bowles of Western University for her botanical expertise, Steve Marshall of U of Guelph for his invertebrate expertise and Greg Thorn of Western University for his expertise on fungus, as well as many other folks with varying types of expertise/interests in the natural world. Which is why Kee and I had some conversations about moth nights to document as many of those night-time critters as we could attract to our black lights. Not that I am an expert in the field of moths, but certainly have an avid interest and have done black lighting at various quality natural areas to see what will come to the lights. And so since 2018, we typically had one or two moth nights a year and a small number of other interested folks joined us. 

I don't have the total number of moth species that we captured on digital film handy. I let Kee keep the running total. But there were several hundred over the years (on one particularly productive night we had 105 species come to our lights in about a 3-hour period) plus dozens and dozens of non-moth critters such as beetles, leafhoppers and such. With the vegetation diversity of Newport Forest, I would not be surprised if there were a thousand or more species of moths, so we had lots more to try and find/photograph.

What follows are some of the more exciting/vivid moths that we were able to photograph:

Abbreviated Button-Slug

Beautiful Wood-Nymph

Canadian Petrophila

This next one is a species of Underwing moth, easily told when its wings are at least partially spread exposing the distinctive underwing pattern and may be the same as the one that follows.

Charming Underwing

Dimorphic Eulithis

Faint-spotted Palthis (rare)

Glorious Habrosyne (rare)

Gold Moth

Harris's Three-spot

IO Moth

Johnson's Euchlaena

Lappet Moth

Northern Burdock Borer

Polyphemus Moth

The Saw-wing

Yellow-shouldered Slug Moth

Eventually Kee and Pat began the process of gifting Newport Forest to the Thames Talbot Land Trust, an excellent organization with involvement in a lot of quality natural areas. You can read more about Newport Forest on the TTLT web site, following this link.

I should also mention that over the years, Kee put out many bulletins that interested folks could subscribe to. The bulletins highlighted what he and others found as a result of the regular forays onto the property at various times of the year. He also had a wildlife camera in place, to document critters that came through along the trail. Some of those images were shared in his bulletin, along with things he found as a result of his numerous vegetation sweeps with his net. Overall, it was quite the undertaking!

Pat passed away in 2020, and sadly, Kee passed away just a week ago, on March 9, 2024. His obituary can be found here.

There has already been some very early thought given to continuing with a future moth night or two at Newport Forest to honour the vision and contributions to nature that Kee and Pat had.

Rest in Peace, Kee. 

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