Heading towards a double century

Here's a new arrival at the trap, the Scalloped Hook-tip. I put the light in a patch of woodland which brings different results from the flowerbed even though both are close and moths can fly long distances. This rakish insect with its jagged and boldly-furled wings takes my total of different species since Penny gave me the trap in 2004 to 196. Actually, we'll be well over 200 because of my impatience with micros and other small brown arrivals. Not a bad tally for a garden in Leeds, where most of us normally see half-a-dozen different types if we're lucky at porchlights or dusk. The Scalloped Hook-tip is interesting incidentally, if not unique, in that it has already flown before becoming an adult insect. The reason for this curious distinction is that its caterpillars pupate by making a cocoon in a birch tree leaf before late autumn. When the leaf floats down, so do they.

The sun meanwhile brought out the butterflies again, including this Speckled Wood. It's enjoying the biggest living thing in our garden and indeed probably in the world: a Coastal Redwood which we bought in a test tube, less than two inches long, at Disneyworld in Florida when the boys were small. The tree is now heading for 30ft high and straight as a die (see this link for the origins of this interesting phrase).