Quiet times

There's supposed to be a warmer spell this coming week but so far hopes of an Indian Summer in the UK have gone the way of the rest of a below-average season all round. Wet and cold is how I will remember 2024 although we have had some stunning short periods of real warmth and the occasional brilliant day. Yesterday was one of them.

The clear sunny sky meant a cold night to follow, however, and the trap was thinly populated this morning. The best arrival was the very fresh Dark Marbled Carpet shown in my first picture, resting happily on the outside of the cowl. 

My other main moth in the last few days has been the Angle Shades, one of the species most commonly sent to me for ID because they seem easily-disturbed by day. This happened to me on a bike ride earlier this week when I brushed a hedge and an Angle Shades whizzed out before skulking back into the shadows - pic below.

Two days later, I was cycling along again when I noticed the moth's unmistakable fighter-plane shape on the tarmac just ahead. I managed to stop and gently lifted it on my finger to the safety of a bush. It had been raining gently and you can see the large raindrop illustrating the effectiveness of the waterproofing of the moth's wings.

Cousins on holiday in Spain have meanwhile had a more exciting time, thanks to their vigilant spotting of another triangular shape on a workaday litter bin. Can you see it in the top pic below? Move down, if not. The spotters are part of a great family network on WhatsApp called Insect Chat which is impressively successful at interesting a new generation in entomology and indeed wildlife of all kinds.

This is a Convolvulus Hawk, one of Europe's largest moths and a rarity in the UK.  By chance, my only encounter with one was at the wedding in Cornwall of another cousin from the same side of the family as the Spanish I-Spy team.  You can read more if you'd like to, here.

Beware of the Elephants

Some good friends set me the challenge above which is handy at this time of the year when caterpillars are wandering around looking for somewhere to chrysalise. I knew the answer because my acquaintanceship with this appealing creature goes back to my early teens when the head of natural history at Leeds Museum, a lovely man called John Armitage, encouraged me and my brother to go and search for them at the end of the Summer holidays.

It's an Elephant Hawk moth cattie and its colour is the sign that it is ready to tuck itself away in a cocoon. The caterpillars are green for almost all their lives, turning olivey-brown and then grey only at the very end. 

This is when they look like elephants' trunks - well, if you half-shut your eyes and open your imagination - and accounts for the name of the moth which often puzzles people. The adult insect is a beautiful pink and lime green and bears no resemblance to an elephant except for those mythical pink ones.

Elephants are loved by all and feature in some of our best children's stories including The Elephant and the Bad Baby which was written by an excellent woman, Elfrida Vipont, who was a prominent Quaker and wrote completely different books about the Quaker way of life. Mind you, The Elephant and the Bad Baby has a very gentle moral point, sugared by the fact that the Bad Baby is a most appealing character.

One of its fans was my granddaughter, now a great entomologist, who sent me the picture below of a Brimstone Moth at Birmingham airport railway station, with a quiz for Granny and myself about what the full sign said. (Granny won with 'Customer Services'). The granddaughter got into quite a conversation with the station staff who said that a lot of Brimstone moths came to their lights and reflective signs at night. So there's a curious piece of species data.

Another young friend, whose topknot can just be seen at the bottom of the next picture, kindly sent me this spot from the canal. She knows that we have had narrowboats pass through with the names of every single member of our family, remote cousins included. And now we have a moth. 

The trap is fairly routine at the moment, but that is not to denigrate the arrivals, including bright little micros such as this Pyrausta purpuralis, a slightly less common relative of the familiar Mint Moth, Pyrausta aurata, which often flickers around near our herbs.

There's also a good number of moths every night and overcrowding in the cones is commonplace - here we have an Angle Shades with its umbrella-style wing-folding visible on the left, a Large Yellow Underwing lurking at the back, a Rosy Rustic and a little ermine micro at the front.

Next we have that fine creature, a Common Marbled Carpet, really quite a size bigger than most otrher carpet moths, and finally a Gothic, very well-named with its patterning so like the spars of an ancient church window.

Hitchhiker

 

Penny had a surprise yesterday. It wasn't until she was reaching 50mph on the way home that she noticed this small, brightly-coloured hitchhiker on the windscreen. It survived the journey including a stop at Tesco's where it made itself more comfortable by snuggling into the wiper, above.

I'm checking on Upper Thames Moths but I'm pretty sure that it's a young Lime Hawk moth cattie, a creature which undergoes quite spectacular changes in its appearance as it grows and sheds its skin, ending up with a vivid blue tail horn.  It seems to have settled in to a box of lime leaves, so we may keep it until it pupates.

With my love of blue, I was meanwhile very chuffed to get this focussed close-up of a Common Blue in our neighbouring field whose generously-wide unploughed margins I was praising only yesterday, when it was the turn of a Small Heath. The blue may be common but it uncommonly lovely.

The same goes for the butterflies and male Southern Hawker dragonfly below which are the fruits of my latest visit to the Trap Grounds nature reserve to photograph its wildlife. The Small White in particular appealed to me, with its left forewing torn and folded over by the batterings of life. It was still up for a prolonged series of courtship dances with a potential mate which kept disrupting my efforts to take its picture.

The moth trap meanwhile remains fairly quiet apart from occasional highlights such as the visit earlier this week from the Clifden Nonpareil. Here are a couple of composites: a 1,2,3 of Light Emeralds, the trio seen through the trap's much-used 'transparent' cowl, and a quintet: two Centre-barred Sallows,  a Willow Beauty, an immigrant White-point, a species enjoying an excellent year, and one of the regular, tiny Small Dusty Waves which seem to like living in our house.

Bluey is Back

What a delightful find in the trap this morning: my favourite moth has come back. The Clifden Nonpareil was long my Holy Grail among UK species, a moth of such rarity in the UK for most of my life that I never seriously hoped to encounter one. All that changed in mid-September 2019 as I describe excitedly in my post at the time here.

Since that epic morning, I have had 15 of these large and glorious moths come calling, notable above all for the lovely blue on their wings - dark on the top of the hindwings and a soft duck egg shade on the underneath as in these photos of last night's arrival.  Like almost all big moths, they are usually pliant in co-operating for pictures and their underwings can be revealed in a way which scarcely ever happens with the very common but also very jittery Large Yellow Underwing and its relatives.  

The actual dates of my Clifdens are 3 Sept 2020 (2), 4 Sept 2020, 5 Sept 2020, 10 Sept 2020, 15 Sept 2020 (2), 18 Sept 2020, 21 Sept 2020, 2 Oct 2020, 21 Sept 2021(3) and 5 Sept 2022. So, none last year. I have been mildly concerned that the triumphant re-appearance of this moth across southern England might have slowed or even gone on the retreat.

Instead, I think that my rather limited trapping late last Summer is more likely to have missed nights when the moths were flying. It will be interesting to see whether I get more over the next five weeks - August 29 is easily my earliest record for the species and, as you can see form the list above, my latest was not until 2nd October.

Last night's Nonpareil was - classically - in the second-to-last eggbox I inspected, in a trap whose visitors were otherwise thin in number and variety - mostly Brimstones, Light Emeralds, Green Carpets and above all Snouts, the commonest species at the moment. I checked out its underside first and then gradually tickled and nudged it into revealing that lovely, shining blue.

After carefully tucking the moth away inside a gloomy bush at the end of the photography session, I spotted a fluttering outside our back door and discovered this rather battered Herald moth, a very fine species which adorns the spine of the first edition of the Moth Bible. They come here infrequently but regularly enough.

In the trap meanwhile, I have had a succession of reasonable moths with constant predictable new arrivals for the year among the long-standing regulars.  Examples below include the Centre-barred Sallow and the Copper Underwing in the top row, the former one of a group of orangey-yellow relations in the Sallow family which signal that Autumn with its similar colours is sadly not far away. The Copper Underwing is even more reluctant than its Yellow cousins to show its fine hindwings. I will have to resort again to taking a video as I did recently of a Large Yellow Underwing with my granddaughter.

The distinctively-marked brown moth in the bottom row is a Turnip Moth and its neighbour is that lovely regular here, a Bordered Beauty.  The busier composite below shows, from top left: a Common or Lesser Common Rustic, a Small Square-spot, a browny mystery, a second Small Square-spot, a Dotted Pug, the devastating Box Moth and in the bottom row, two Lunar Thorns (complete with tiny moons on their wings) on either side of a Light Emerald.

In the world of butterflies, meanwhile, a rather unrewarding wander along the generously uncultivated margin of our local Big Field did at least produce this Small Heath, the only one of the regular field 'browns' which had eluded me this year. One of my great-nieces also used her eagle eyes to spot the chrysalis of I know not what on a wall near her home in east London - pic second below.

And elsewhere in the wild(ish) world, I came across this small frog locally and a flock of Pied Wagtails in the garden of Friends House on super-busy Euston Road in the heart of London.

Clickety-click

A curious beetle leads my post today, salvaged from water and a bit dopey but otherwiese apparently unhurt I think that it is a Click Beetle of some kind - so at least says the iBug facility on my son's 'phone - but which one of the UK's many species it is, I cannot say. I see from online references, however, that its name comes from the click it gives when it makes a little jump. Mine was too stunned by its recent immersion to show this talent off.

It came on a day of drenching rain for the whole morning including the last three hours or so of the moth trap's stint, and so my granddaughter and I were faced with quite a few soggy eggboxes. This made the task of checking the moths a little harder and more dispiriting, so I went back over them later in the day in case we had missed anything. Then I had a third check before stashing everything away and giving the moths a break last night.

I'm glad that I did because it was only on this third audit that I spotted the dart-shaped moth above and below - small enough to be a micro which may be why I hadn't noticed it the first two times. Or maybe I had looked insufficiently closely and dismissed it as the rather similar and currently very common Straw Dot. In fact it is a Pinion-streaked Snout, a little macro moth which has only visited me once before, in 2018, five months before the pandemic.

Of course, I may have hosted it on other occasions but failed to recognise it as I so nearly did yesterday.  Meanwhile here is another nice arrival, an Old Lady moth. This is my top candidate for renaming in our more enlightened times.

Next a Chinese Character moth with its highly distinctive position at rest which accounts for my alternative name for it of the Bird Poo Moth. The Chinese character is the very small silvery tracery in the shape of a trident which is the Chinese pictogram for 'mountain'.

My composite shows a yet to be ID-ed micro, a Flame Shoulder with an attractive pinkish tinge, a Flounced Rustic,  a couple of very differently coloured Snouts, a Light Emerald, a Marbled Beauty, another Light Emerald and a second micro needing ID. I have homework to do.

Finally the Box Moth is still around, doubtless the result of more bingeing by the species' caterpillars on box hedges whose owners must be tearing out their hair at the arrival of the resourceful immigrant species in the UK.

Beautiful stinger

I was reading up today about some of the rare close relatives of the Red Underwing which I featured yesterday and a detail about one in particular caught my eye. There has only ever been one Minsmere Crimson Underwing found in the UK, resting on the outside of a light trap in the Minsmere bird reserve in Suffolk in September 20 years ago. Much of the catch inside the trap, says the Moth Bible, 'had been destroyed by hornets.'

Cue my visit to my own trap this morning after a chilly night for the time of the year when I was not expecting rich pickings. Bold as brass on the eggbox nearest the lampholder was the very fine hornet above. Luckily, it did not seem to have destroyed anything.

I have read that hornets are very unaggressive even though they pack a nasty punch in their stings. That has certainly always been my experience. When I find one like this, I always take out its chosen eggbox carefully and chuck it into a bush. Each time serves to remind me to be careful when turning over eggboxes in the Summer. Even the most docile hornet would object to having one of my pudgy fingers squashing it.

My favourite moth in last night's catch was this exquisite Shuttle-shape Dart, a common species but I have never seen an example as fresh and clearly defined as this one with such a strong contrast between the white 'helmet' and delicate silvery shuttle shapes and the velvety black body. As far as I can tell, it is a female of the standard species but it certainly stood out in the trap.

Next we have a Flounced Rustic, a moth which will be common in the eggboxes for the next month, and then a Canary-shouldered Thorn, as lovely as its name suggests. Below that is a sleek micro which I will ID shortly after I've taken up the morning cuppa and settled down with my Micro-moths Bible.

Below is a Setaceous (or 'bristly') Hebrew Character, the adjective referring to some tiny organ which needs a magnifying glass or even microscope to show. And then I think a small Square-spot and finally a couple which elude my clumsy efforts at ID-ing this type of medium-sized and predominantly brown moth. But I will keep on trying.