General comments
Almost certainly extinct. If found, should be treated as a species of Conservation Concern (Endangered) in either county.

Hertfordshire Notes:
Gibbs (1901) notes the Lappet as 'unusually plentiful' during 1900, noting that several were taken on the street lamps of St Albans that year and almost every local list for the next thirty or forty years also contains this species. Allan (1950) commented, for the Bishops Stortford area, that the Lappet was 'Plentiful in the larval stage on Sloe in the autumn. In 1934 it was abundant as far north as Cambridge, the larvae being so common as to be a nuisance when beating'. Comments such as these are fairly typical of the 1930s and 1940s and the moth was probably present in every Blackthorn hedge in the county. Today it is either resident at excessively low density or else it is extinct with us - most likely the latter. The principal decline in Hertfordshire (and also the London Area) appears to have taken place during the 1950s and coincides perfectly with two major changes in agricultural practice - the advent of agro-pesticides such as DDT and the large-scale removal of hedges to increase the size of fields in order to satisfy the post-war need for increased food supplies. In more recent times, occasional attempts at re-establishing itself have met with stiff resistance in the form of the flail-mower. The winter flailing of hedges ranks alongside DDT as one of the most environmentally damaging innovations of the twentieth century. By 1985, when the Bishops Stortford Natural History Society came to revise the local list that P. B. M. Allan had published in 1950, the Lappet was listed as 'widely distributed but not common'. Conversation with the late Charles Watson and others who had a hand in its production suggests strongly that it was based more on a perception of a few years earlier than the true situation at 1985. I moved to live in Bishops Stortford in October 1986 and in spite of considerable trapping effort have recorded the species there only once - a male at Sawbridgeworth Marsh on 17th July 1990; the hedge alongside which I trapped it was subsequently "managed". In my opinion it had more or less vanished by the mid-1980s. The only post-1960 records available are from Stevenage in 1967 (Jack Newton), Totteridge, 5th July 1973 (Ian Lorimer), Bishops Stortford, 5th August 1979 (Charles Watson), Harpenden, 17th July 1990 (Adrian Riley), Sawbridgeworth Marsh, 17th July 1990 (Colin Plant), Bishops Stortford, 8th July 1993 (James Fish and Julian Reeves), Long Marston, 9th July 1994 (Alan Bernard) and Pirton, 1995 (Dug Heath). Since then there have been three reports of individual moths only in 2009, 2011 and 2012. Only one of these was from an area where it might have been breeding; the other two were
almost certainly wanderers. Searches have failed to produce any further evidence of a presence.

Middlesex Notes:
Reported only from Hanworth in 1900 and the Ruislip area up to 1959.
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	Retained Specimen / Photograph will be Required.

Recorded in 23 (56%) of 41 10k Squares. First Recorded in 1887. Last Recorded in 2012. Additional Stats

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