Greenmantle

Snuggling up to a Common Marbled Carpet - a positively Farrow and Ball sense of colour matching. There were about 50 other moths in the trap, including Frosted Orange, Setaceous Hebrew Character and plenty of Large Yellow Underwings

Lots of moths yesterday; just one featured this morning, but what a cracker!  This is the Green-brindled Crescent, an autumn moth making its debut for me in Oxfordshire although its relatives used to call around this time of the year back in Leeds.

Look at its shark's fin. The more you study moths, the more fascinating detail you see

Like the Burnished Brass shown yesterday, this is one of the relatively small number of UK moths favoured with metallic wing scales whose positioning uses reflection and refraction to give off that enticing gleam. Actually, rather than enticing, it is more likely to be a deterrent form of camouflaging, playing tricks with predators' vision as well as with the light.

I photographed this one in various types of light, from outdoors on a misty morning - the first two - to indoors - first under a lamp, then with a head-torch illuminating the moth (you might have enjoyed the specatcle of my antics) and finally on a windowsill. In the last three, note that the colouring of our ancient Early Times mini-chest-of-drawers with William Morris's Strawberry Thief design has long ago lost its original green. It's now a blueish colour, again because of the effects of light. Early Times, too, has faded; indeed its shops have sadly gone altogether.

Tomorrow, the spider and the fly. Be afraid...