Butterfly debut

Penny and I and a friend saw our first butterfly of the year yesterday, a very early Brimstone flying happily round in the sunshine which has been making the last week extremely delightful The nights are still frosty and by evening the garden gets really chilly. But from midday until teatime, the sun has actually been uninterrupted and hot.

We all agreed that seeing a Brimstone so early (last year's first wasn't until mid-March) meant good luck for at least a year and probably five. We'd just been to a seminar on mediaeval women at Wolfson College (yes, Oxford is good for the ageing brain) and our superstition seemed perfectly reasonable alongside many of theirs.

Actually, Googling such things suggests that if your first butterfly of the year is white, that means good luck, while a yellow one such as the Brimstone portends lots of sunny weather. I am happy with either belief, or consequence, but in my lifetime, the first butterfly I've seen has almost invariably been a Brimstone and indeed this is often said to be the source of the word 'butterfly' - the butter-coloured fly which is so closely associated with the coming of Spring.

One perhaps more interesting story which pops up when you research Brimsones is the famous fake example, shown above. This was brought to the English butterfly expert James Petiver in 1702 by one of his usually reliable contacts, a William Charlton who sadly died later that year. It was declared to be a new species by Linnaeus himself and named Papilio ecclipsis on account of the two sickle moons and recorded in the 12th edition of Systema Naturae in 1767.

The fake - a watercolour by another 18th century butterfly expert, William Jones

Nearly 30 years later, however, the great man's disciple Fabricius looked at the specimen and realised that it was a fake, a standard Brimstone with the black blotches, moons and other delicate markings painted on. It was clearly done very skilfully but the evidence does not survive; the keeper of Natural Curiosities at the British Museum where the insect was by now stored was so angry that he stamped the poor, flimsy little hoax into pieces.  

Two replicas were later created (one in my first pic) and may still be seen at the Linnaean Society in London, a nice acknowledgment that even the greatest of natural history classifiers could go wrong. Otherwise we have to be content with the normal Brimstone, which is very common but still exquisite butterfly, or the lovely Continental species Cleopatra which has vivid orange colouring on its forewings.

This butterfly excitement hasn't diverted me from moths; rather, it prompted me to put out the trap last night for the first time in weeks.  The frost came but so did a solitary visitor and an appropriate one: the March Moth shown here. My first moth of the year on the same day as my first butterfly! What has fate in store?

Proving a negative

Happy New Year belatedly and I hope that you had a lovely Christmas, quiet or fun-filled according to your preference. We've had a happy time with the grandchildren and plenty of peace and quiet in between. Lots of good long Winter walks and bike rides too.

We even managed to stir ourselves in the current very cold weather and were rewarded today by sights such as this display of 'Puddle Icicles', a beautiful little micro landscape caused by cars splashing water on to the verge from a puddle, on an otherwise unremarkable stretch of road.

The fields immediately around our house meanwhile look like this, below, cold as cold can be, very still and quiet and misty too. Not the ideal circumstances for moths nor indeed moth trappers. However, driving back from Worcester two nights ago, when the dashboard said that the temperature outside the car was -3.5 degrees, we saw a moth flutter in the headlights.

Ever the optimist, I was persuaded by this to light the lamp when we got home, keeping my fingers crossed that the intense cold wouldn't do something nasty to the mercury vapour lightbulb.  Here's the trap awaiting visitors. Did they arrive?

No, they did not. In the morning, the bulb was fine but the cowl had a thick rime of frost and the lawn all around was crunchy with thick ice.

The eggboxes were empty of all forms of life, not even the tiny flies which appear on almost every other day of the year.  I will have another go in a couple of days' time when the weather may have crept back up to nine or ten degrees during the day and well above freezing at night. Meanwhile, I am having a look back at the year and hoping to compare my rather unscientific results with the much better-organised ones of Dave Wilton and the other ever-helpful contributors to my rod and staff, the Upper Thames Moths blog.

All clear

There are endless advantages to having a hobby from the simple pleasure it gives to the more complex psychological needs which it no doubt fills. But one of the most practical is that it makes you a very easy person to buy presents for. When I was a boy, this might have been the sinister-sounding 'Get him a killing bottle' or a set of entomological pins; this year, my top present (from Penny needless to say) has been a new moth trap cowl.

This is the transparent collar which encircles the bowl of the trap and holds up the mercury vapour bulb and, as I have mentioned several times in posts, it is a long time since it was tramsparent. The ratio of masking tape to plastic had become almost unbearable and the remaining plastic was rubbed and scratched. Behold the difference, above, between this venerable but failing item and its glorious successor which I unwrapped on Christmas Day.  

I have put this out tonight for its debut after a brief interlude when we took the grandchildren to the local skatepark to try out their scooters and inline skates and found this delicate little lacewing on their car widow, speckled with droplets from the very thin mist which has hung around all day. I also had to dry out the eggboxes in front of the fire, a toasty position which they shared with some of the same grandchildren's drying laundry

Then it was time to peel off the shiny new collar's protective film and plug everything in. I can't wait until morning to see what, if anything, comes to take and an admiring look. Last night drew a visitor total of nil, after the delightful Three Wise Moths of Christmas night. It is still mild but very misty and we had a bonfire and some fireworks, so the odds are balanced.  Sleep well!

Merry Christmas from my festive lamp conversion

Hi all and I hope that you have a lovely Christmas and wish you all good things for the New Year. I am hoping to attract three Wise Moths over the holiday although it looks as though they will have to have travelled from very afar, being a type of Ghost moth endemic to New Zealand.  All warmest and here's hoping for more everyday but interesting arrivals in the New Year! 

Update on Christmas evening: Well, I DID get Three Wise Moths but not from the Wiseana family. They are an excellent trio for this time of the year, nonetheless: a smart Winter moth, A Mottled Umber and finally a Cypress Carpet, a relative newcomer to the UK which is flourishing like the green bay tree.

Encouraged by this and by the pleasant mildness of the weather, I have lit the lamp again tonight, this time without the possibly slightly deterrent effect of my home-made star. Let's see what happens...

In the bleak mid-Winter

 I'm not sure that it actually is mid-winter quite yet but there's some sort of solstice on 21st December - goodness, tomorrow I mean - so we can't be far away by any definition. Not the most prosperous time of year for moths, then, but they are still about. Before it turned cold again, I put out the trap for a second and third night after my last post and a very small handful of visitors turned up.

Two to be precise, both Winter Moths and both in good and rather attractive condition. The sceond one obligingly spent the night inside the plastic cowl and so I was able to photograph its underside, although I'm sorry that the picture is a bit blurry. The cowl is very battered after many years of use.

I put the trap close to a wall with a lot of ivy in leaf nearby in the hope that hibernating moths might be lured out. No luck this time but my moth-minded granddaughter and her brothers roll up here on Sunday night so we'll all have another go then.

Very quiet - but not completely

 

It's been suddenly mild after a couple of cold snaps and so I lit the lamp again having originally decided that things were over for 2024. I was encouraged too by this glorious sunset which made me wonder if the moths would all ignore my trap and follow Epicurus who in the famous words of Lucretius 'fared afar beyond the flaming ramparts of the world until he wandered the unmeasurable All.'

Perhaps they did, because the sole new arrival was this spindly Common Plume. A pleasure for me to see and photograph but definitely not enough to interest my gluttonous robin, below, which flew away empty-beaked.

There was also a very bright Moon which is known to divert some moths into a hopeless attempt to fly the 238,855 miles from Earth.

And at the bottom of the eggboxes, two December moths which arrived at least a week ago. Dead, sadly. They could have easily have flown to freedom but preferred to hunker down and expire, something that I've often noticed before with many types of moth when tucking the trap away in the shed out of robin reach. Theydo not eat and perhaps they have mated and are programmed to hide rather than risk birds and bats and so have nothing left to do.

Basking in the Sun

The question which ended my last post was answered helpfully at the weekend when I was walking into Oxford to meet Penny and saw a brilliant flutter of wings in the bright sunshine. It was a Red Admiral which swooped around a few times and then returned to the brick wall where it had been basking - yes, genuinely basking in the warmth of a December morning, a rare interlude between recent rain and fierce cold. 

The butterfly was so content that it allowed me to get up close and take the second photo before I left it to carry on sun-bathing. Back home in the roofspace where I have been sorting piles of old papers, a third Buttoned Snout put in an appearance. However dark and cobwebby, it's definitely their kind of place.

I'm not sure what the equally contented-looking fly is in the picture above but there's all manner of insect life amid the rafters. Here are some old wasps' nest, lifeless thank goodness, built by a Queen who must have hibernated somewhere comfy in the insulation fluff.

The warmer spell encouraged me to put the moth trap out and I was rewarded with a nice clutch of December Moths and one very gracefully patterned Winter, Autumnal or November Moth which obligingly perched on the trap's transparent cowl so that I could photograph it from both on top and below.

My proceedings were watched carefully throughout by a Robin but he didn't manage to pounce on anything while I was looking the other way.

Buttoned up

Not being a particular fan of Winter Moths, I have all but moth-balled (ho-hum, no pun originally  intended) the trap for the Winter though I may bring it out next month to create a brightly shining Christmas star. To my surprise, however, I have spent today in the company of not just one Nationally Scarce B moth but two. I was organising piles of old but interesting paperwork in our cobwebby attic when I saw a telltale flutter.

It was the Buttoned Snout, above, a moth which I only met for the first time in April this year when I had second thoughts about checking another little flutter on the bare soil of our vegetable garden. Its distinguished status may be about to change as in recent years it appears to have increased in numbers in parts of the South and Midlands including Oxfordshire Maybe our attic is a key expansion base.

My speculation about that was fuelled by a second modest flutter when I swept behind an archive box and roused the moth in my second picture. This is the standard version of the Button Snout whereas the first one is, I think, the form unicolor. In the standard form, the reasons for the species' name is evident: the smart, shiny button marks on the forewing. Along with the light-coloured streak, they give the moth an air of working on the lobby staff of a grand hotel.

I was very encouraged about this as my archiving task is likely to see me spending rather a lot of time in the roofspace, like Montaigne in his tower though perhaps not so productively. My day was made complete by a hibernating Peacock which got into such a tizz about the attic's light being unexpectedly on, that I let it out of a window into the cold. I never know whether one should do this to creatures woken from hibernation. But at least it wasn't raining, and if it does, the butterfly can surely creep back in.

Variety show

 

The nights are getting colder and our late-sown Morning Glory and Cosmos are struggling to bring to flower the buds which they have bravely produced in the last few weeks. I'm finding it similarly tough to keep putting out the moth trap in the hope of a few surprises, especially as the mornings are also pretty dark when it's time for P's and my tea.

However, the arrival of a swept-wing Oak Hook-tip a week ago cheered my outlook and I was intrigued by the almost entirely featureless but dainty moth below. I think that it is one of the Winter/Autumnal/November brethren whose colour and pattern scales are even more indistinct than usual and perhaps mssing scales;  but it is nonetheless gracefully pretty along with its reflection and it had no problem in flying away.

The eggboxes have since maintained at least a show of variety, with below (l-r) a Cypress Carpet, a Sprawler, a Scarce Umber and the dart-shaped micro Udea ferrugalis, also known more appealingly as the Rusty-dot Pearl.

Then we have the iPhone's two takes on Feathered Thorns, a nice Beaded Chestnut and one of a regular series of December moths which do at least look suited to the month with their woolly coats.

Next an unknown type of fly, though my new ID ally the iPhone bug-identifyer suggest Mesembrina merediniana or the Noonday Fly. I will check that out further but accept it for now.  Then we have another Rusty-dot Pearl. and a second example of digital camera colour changes with two Mottled Umbers, the first unusually showing its petticoat underwings.

Lastly, a third and much more isosceles Rusty-dot Pearl, a Light Brown Apple micro, Epiphyas postvittana, and two November/Winter/Autumnals, the first showing its petticoats too, albeit a little more shyly than the Mottled Umber.  Not a bad range in a week as the final month of the year draws closer.

Thank Goodness, the Merveille has made it

The night sky is busy with lights at this time of year - Guy Fawkes above and Hallowe'en below. Can the moth trap hold its own against such exciting alternative attractions. Fortunately the answer is Yes, it can. 

And fortunately too, there are still lovely things out there for it to tempt, above all the fabulous Merveille du Jour which has always visited me here in the late Autumn. I love the name as much as the subtly-coloured moth itself, although strictly speaking it is a Merveille de la Nuit. The composite below is interesting because the closest by far of the four images to what the human eye sees is the one at the bottom right. iPhone cameras are marvellous but their relentless search for light can play pop with colours and tones. 

Elsewhere among the eggboxes, I have been visited by this distinctive micro below,  Acleris variegana or the Garden Rose Tortrix. I've posted two pictures so that you can tell from the eggbox what a mite it is.

Then we have another of the many Emmelina monodactyla micros which my garden clear-ups are disturbing by day; and after that a fourth micro whose focus is, I think, too blurred for a definite ID.  

Finally, a typical souvenir of another visit to the grandchildren, a ladybird late to hibernate and meanwhile dallying next to a grandson's brightly-varnished nail. You may be able to see from the photo that his thumbnail is blue. They are as bright as any Brazilian butterfly.