A ten-year-old's insect collection, kept to the standard a museum would use, and published one specimen at a time.
Purpose
You know the glass cases at a natural history museum — rows of beetles and butterflies on pins, each with a small card beside it telling you what it is and where it came from. Jed is building one of those. Except nothing in his is bought. Every specimen is one he found himself, with a record of exactly where and when he found it.
Which means the collection is also a map of everywhere the family has been. A beetle from a trip in March ends up in the drawer beside a moth from the backyard in July. Give it a few years and the case is a record of the travelling as much as it is a record of insects.
This site is the catalog. It is not a portfolio and not a blog. Every specimen gets its own page at its own number, and the gallery is just the volume laid out in order.
Example
Each catch becomes a card in the gallery and a page of its own behind it. The card carries the four things you need to tell one specimen from another: its number, its name, where it came from, and the day it was found.
The number is given the moment the specimen is started, so it can be written on the bag in the field. No two specimens ever share one, which is what makes the catalog worth anything in ten years.
System
One number, from the start. A specimen gets its catalog number the moment it is started — on a phone in the field, if that is where it happens — and that number goes on the bag. It appears on the label, in the app, and in the URL. A pencil field number is still there for anyone working off a paper sheet.
A volume a year. The volume year is the 4-H year: each opens on the first of October, closes the following September, and closes on its own — no judgment call required.
Except the first one, which runs fourteen months. Jed started collecting in August 2026, two months before the 4-H year opened. Rather than call those two months a rehearsal, Vol. 01 simply opens in the month the collection actually began and closes with the 2026—27 project year. Vol. 02 onward are clean twelves. A first volume is always a ragged length; that is what starting looks like, and it is worth recording rather than tidying away.
The place, not the address. A specimen without a locality is a curiosity, so every record carries one. But Jed is ten and a lot of this collecting happens in his own backyard, so a locality marked as a home is rounded off for anybody who isn't signed in: the public site says “within 11 km of Highland, Indiana” and puts the map pin on the town. The exact point is still recorded, still printed on the physical label pinned under the specimen, and still visible to Jed. Generalizing a sensitive locality and stating the uncertainty is what the large biodiversity databases do too — it is the convention, not a compromise.
Roman numerals for the month. Dates are written 25.VIII.2026, the standard on specimen labels worldwide, so nobody ever has to wonder whether 8/9 means August or September.
Two labels per pin. The locality label goes on first and never changes. The determination label goes below it and can be replaced when an identification is corrected — which is why they're separate, on the pin and in the database. Correcting an ID adds a new record rather than overwriting the old one. What he thought, and when, stays part of the history.
His notes, in his words. Every specimen carries what it was doing when he found it and anything else he wants to say about it, and every photograph from the jar to the box goes in the order he chooses. Click a card in the gallery and it opens like a drawer.
Standards
A ten-year-old will misidentify things. So the catalog is built so that being uncertain costs nothing: every entry records how sure he is, and unidentified is a real answer rather than an error. A specimen can sit in the drawer for a year with no name on it and still be a complete, honest record.
Nothing appears on this site automatically. A specimen is entered at the desk, and then published — deliberately, one at a time, when it's finished. What you see here is what he decided was ready.
Next
The method — catching, killing, preserving, pinning, labelling, and the 4-H standard the whole thing is kept to — is written out in full. If you want to start one of these yourself, that page is the whole thing.