Robert Heckford

Robert "Bob" Heckford is a retired solicitor whose real career has been decades of amateur research into the poorly understood life histories of Britain's smaller moths. The Linnean Society's 2015 award citation records his scientific association with the Natural History Museum and his contribution to the 2013 checklist of British Isles Lepidoptera. In 2019 he separately won the Marsh Charitable Trust's Lepidoptera Award for Lifetime Achievement, whose citation describes him as Britain's foremost micro-lepidopterist, credits him with adding sixteen species to the British list, over 230 published papers, co-editing the 2013 British Isles checklist, and rediscovering the rare moth Plutella haasi in Scotland in 2009. Three moth species have been named after him in total.

In 2010 a new moth species, Ectoedemia heckfordi, was formally described and named in his honour, after he discovered it in 2004 at the National Trust's Hembury Woods near Buckfastleigh. Per the original taxonomic account, the type specimen began as a larva found in an oak leaf mine in August 2004, reared through to an adult moth the following year, the combination of fieldwork and patient rearing that turns a suspicious leaf mine into a new species on the scientific record.

One common summary of the species should be corrected: Ectoedemia heckfordi is not unique to Dartmoor or even to Britain. Even the species' own Wikipedia article only states it is "only known from Devon in Great Britain," without mentioning that the Austrian Barcode of Life project has since recorded it as new to Austria too, a reminder that "new to a country" is a different claim from "new to science", and that even a specialist summary can miss a later record.