To the lighthouse

We had some friends staying a year or so ago and when I took them their morning tea, they said: "We didn't know you had a lighthouse so nearby."

"Nor did we," I replied. "Where is it?" Could there really be such navigational aids on the Oxford Canal? When darkness fell that evening, we discovered the answer. Their bedroom on the other side of the house looked out over inky darkness which was lit up at eccentric intervals by a vivid flash. It was a neighbour's wonky security light.

I am not one to complain about bright lights at night, for obvious reasons (though luckily I can mask the trap so that nobody has a direct view of the bulb; at worst they get a rather beautiful, faeriland glow). But the curious structure in my top two pictures, which I have erected in the hope of enticing the unusually large number of rare immigrant moths which are around this autumn (see Daily Telegraph cutting. left), does look like a lighthouse. It's actually an enormous fishtank we inherited (does anyone want one because we don't?), stood on its end.

The weather has played pop with my first two nights of experimenting with this device and I have only attracted one arrival, below. It was definitely brown and so in spite of its vestigial if almost non-existent wing band, I am pretty sure it is my first Winter Moth.

These are the little fluttering creatures which get caught in your car's headlights between now and February when, on the whole, few other moths fly. The species is extremely interesting on account of its equivalent of blood having anti-freeze properties which explain its lonely ability to put up with the cold. Even so, it can take half-an-hour for a Winter Moth to 'warm up' enough to fly.