A green thought in a green shade

I was thinking of having one of my occasional rants about the absence of blue, my favourite colour, in moths; but I am consoled by two arrivals in different shades of green, which is the one I like second best.

The first is this little fellow above, the Green Oak Roller, a micro-moth which tends to get people like me excited in the hope that it might be a similar but far rarer macro called the Cream-bordered Green Pea. Now isn't that a nice name? The C-bGP has an even scarcer relative called the Spiny Bollworm, with a rather more olive, foreign appearance, appropriately as its home is Africa and it comes here only as an exceedingly infrequent migrant. It lost out in the name stakes but is one of the UK's more famous moths, as an example was found in the light trap at Buckingham Palace in 1964, shortly after a state visit from Tanzania.

Here by contrast is the wonderfully subtle Green Arches, whose colouring comes and goes to the human eye, depending on the light. It isn't always easy to get the beauty across in a photo, but I quite like this one of it apparently striding away with its long dress trailing behind it, like Queen Elizabeth I after her experience with the puddle and Sir Walter Raleigh's cloak.