In case you forgot to mark your calendar, National Moth Week 2012 in the U.S. begins July 23 and lasts through July 27. So if you haven’t sugared a few trees, strung up a wine rope, and strung up and illuminated your white sheet, you had better get to it or rush being left out of all the fun.

For those in the northeastern corner of the country, this year’s National Moth Week is particularly auspicious as it is the first year in quite a long time that a new field guide has been available to make identification of the moths observed much, much, easier. Even if  you’re observing the week somewhere other than the northeast, David Beadle and Seabrooke Leckie’s copiously illustrated new Peterson Field Guide to Moths of Northeastern North America is still a handy book to have in order to, if not provide you with the precise identifying information for a moth you note in – say, Oregon – then it will at least help you to get the ID down to Family or even Genus level.

In addition to Beadle and Leckie’s new field guide, there are a few online reference and community sites that are very helpful in identifying unknown moths:

In fact, the last of these is particularly getting into the spirit of the week by offering a special online Patch to their registered members who contribute a sighting to their Moths of the World – National Moth Week Mission.