Now what. Every step from a jar in the field to a numbered, labelled specimen in the box — in the order it actually happens, with nothing skipped and nothing invented.
The whole thing
The hard part isn't catching insects. It's that a bag ends up in the freezer and stays there, because nobody wrote down what happens next. So here is what happens next, all of it, in order.
Not every step happens the same day. Steps 1 to 4 happen on the day you catch it — and step 4 can happen on the phone before you have left the field. Everything after that can happen tonight, next weekend, or in three months, and that is completely normal.
Click a step to open it. The rest fold away, so you are only ever reading the one you are on.
Bags, slips, two jars, a pencil, the phone. If you like a paper sheet, take one — it's optional now, because the phone can start a specimen in the field.
Out of sheets? Print more. Page two is bag slips — cut them up and keep a stack in the bag.
Net it, jar it, keep moving. Don't stop to write anything — you are collecting right now, not cataloguing.
Moths and butterflies get a firm pinch on the sides of the body through the net first. It stops the thrashing that wrecks the wings before the jar has done anything.
Two jars. A beetle loose with a moth ruins the moth.
The killing jar kills in ten or twenty minutes and then it starts doing damage. Once something has stopped moving, move it out.
Into a bag or a small vial with a folded tissue. Butterflies and moths go into a paper envelope with their wings folded up. All of it rides home in a hard box so nothing gets crushed.
The jar is not a container. It's a jar.
This is the most important minute of the whole thing. Open the desk, press New specimen, check the date and the place, press Start. It gets its catalog number right there — FC 01.0007 — and that is what you write on the bag.
Take the photo of it in the jar, or the bag, or wherever it is. Add it on the Photos tab. If the phone recorded when and where, the photo offers to fill those in for you. That's the record started.
Then pin it or freeze it. Pin it tonight if there is time — nothing is easier to work with than a specimen that never dried out. Otherwise freeze it, bag and all; it will keep for months. To pin something frozen, leave it shut in the bag until it reaches room temperature so the water forms on the plastic, not the insect.
Everything else — what it was doing, what it is, how sure you are — goes in whenever. The specimen's own page has a tab for each, and nothing is ever locked.
The number on the bag and the number in the catalog are the same number. That is the whole trick.
A week on the board and it's dry. Open its page, Label tab: it shows the two labels exactly as they should read. Copy each onto one of the pre-cut labels from the kit with the archival pen — block capitals, one line per line, scientific name underlined.
Locality label on the pin first, at the middle step of the pinning block. It stays forever. Determination label below it at the lowest step; it gets replaced when an identification is corrected. Then press It's on the pin.
Got label stock and a laser printer? The desk prints a whole sheet at true size instead. Same labels, same words.
Two labels under every pin. Locality on top, name below.
Off the board, labels on the pin, into a case. Cases are numbered on the lid — Case 1, Case 2. Inside, group by order: all the beetles together, all the flies together, a small header label pinned above each group. That is how a judge reads it and how every museum drawer is kept. Leave room in each group.
On the Specimen tab, write down the case, the tray if you use them, and the position, and mark it In the box. The catalog number on the label is how any specimen is found again; the printed list in the binder says which case it is in.
By order in the case, by number on the label.
No deadline and no order. Work out what it is tonight, or in March, or next year — unidentified is a real answer and nothing in the system minds. Say how sure you are.
Photograph the pinned specimens in batches, once a month, and add them to the Photos tab. Put them in the order you want, pick the cover, write a line under any that need one. The strip is the story of the specimen from jar to box.
As soon as it has a photo you are happy showing, publish it — the Publish tab has one button. It does not have to be named, labelled or in a case yet; the public page follows every edit you make after. Nothing is public until you press it, and it can be taken back down the same way.
Paper
One PDF, two pages. Page one is the day sheet — twenty rows, one place, one day. Page two is bag slips, thirty-two to a page, cut them up and keep a stack with the jars.
Plain black and white so any printer will do it. Print a pile at the start of a season and forget about it.
Names
Every specimen ends up with two numbers, and they do different jobs.
Yours, if you keep one. In pencil, on the bag, when you are working off a paper sheet. Optional now that the catalog number can be given in the field — but kept forever when it exists, because it's the thread back to the notebook.
The catalog's. Given the moment the specimen is started, so it can go on the bag right away. It can be corrected if it ever needs to match a label or a slip; two specimens just can't share one. This is the one on the label and in the URL.
Real museums keep both, for the same reason: in the field there is a pencil and no catalog, and at the desk there is a catalog and no memory of which bag was which.
More
This page is the path. The reference is everything underneath it — the equipment, where to point a pin on a beetle versus a grasshopper, what the 4-H standard asks for at every grade, what to 3D print instead of buy, and where all of this comes from.