The trap's biggest regular visitor, by some margin, has arrived: the Poplar Hawk. It is quite a feat for these insects to conceal themselves during the day and fly un-noticed at night. You can see the disparity with the little Red Twin Spot Carpet (Sorry, Flame Carpet - see Ben's Comment) in the photo above, which also shows the hawk's unusual habit of resting with its forewings behind its hind ones. Moths this size keep up my spirits, as a dilettante observer, after nights when everything which arrives is small and brown.
They should be here for a while now; looking back through the blog, I see that they visited well into June in 2008 and last year. Two years ago, the somewhat smaller but much more vividly-coloured Elephant Hawk also paid a couple of calls but there were none last year. I live in hope. Poplar hawks are very docile after a night in the trap and sleepily accept transfer on to sprigs of plants in the interests of photography. If you look back to June last year, you'll find a pair of them posing on a bamboo cane, perfectly aligned like a dancing combo.
7 comments:
You say they don't mind being transferred onto plants: how do you move moths without hurting them?
I quite like them, but my wife doesn't; and they've damaged clothes before. But often when I try to put a glass over them and take them outside they seem to panic and end up being damaged in varying degrees, which seems horribly sad to me.
(Oh, and as if it needed to be said, that poplar hawk is stunning!)
That picture reminds me of one of those Farnrough air display fly-pasts from the late 1960s, with a Vulcan bomber and a diminutive fighter plane in formation...
Hi jps - it's a very good point you make. I'm 99 percent sure there's no hurt. What I do is slide a sprig or cane towards them very gently, at which point they either sleepily adjust their footing on to it, or if they are less sleepy (always the case with the Pugs, Carpets and other small moths), they just fly away. I never actually pick them up, although they have quite often crawled on to my fingers or, after taking flight, changed their minds and landed on my dressing gown.
if they are in your house and lively, it is much harder to catch and move them without them panicking - same as with the bumble bees which suicidally try to get into our kitchen all the time, as per posts earlier in the blog and comments. Phil and others will correct me if I'm wrong, but I'd recommend using a small box (so that it's dark inside) and then putting them out. I think any panic will be short-lived. Most moths don't do any harm indoors actually, and the big ones won't damage clothes. I'm not an expert on those that do, but they are few in number. I think there's plenty on the net about them (hopefully mostly true!).
Phil, that's a comparison which has often occurred to me too! Way back, I think I used it for another moth with the heading Stealth Moth - a hooktip I think, although they are more like the fighters in Star Wars. I wonder how much work and observation has been done on moth flight and the reasons for the very wide range of wing shapes? Or indeed on why the Poplar Hawk folds its wings as it does.
All warm wishes, M
Hi Martin, nice size comparison, the Carpet is a Flame Carpet.
Regards
Ben
Oh, many thanks Ben. I don't think I will ever get Carpets right. (Indoors, too, Penny doubts my taste). Much appreciated, M
I never thought of a box: too wary of hurting them to work blindly. But I'll give it a go. Maybe a glass and piece of card first, then when they're definitely detached from the original surface put a cover over the clear glass.
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