Plenty about - including TWO new

This is an anachronistic post in that the moths featured arrived here last Thursday and Friday night. In  the morning I was preoccupied by the jumbo visitor, the Privet Hawk moth, and then we were off to Suffolk. The last three days have been devoted to my moth-y discoveries there, before they went cold. So now we are on a journey back into the past, or at least just under a week ago.

The delay has been worthwhile in that my initial assumption that these 'leftovers' were run-of-the-mill has proved wildly mistaken Two of them are moths which I have not met before. They are shown above, first a Brown Silver-line which is common but had somehow passed me by in both Leeds and Oxfordshire; and secondly, the intricately beautiful Toadflax Pug which I ignorantly thought was one of the Carpets until the experts on the Upper Thames Moth blog gently put me right. 

'Toadflax' is one of those words which inspires you to Google - in my ignorance again, I did not know what sort of plant it was. Courtesy of the Wildlife Trusts, here is a small photo. I recognise it now from countless wastelands and patches of scrub.

Back to the moths snd the next two are ones which I was to meet at Cavendish Hall, an irresistable, shining Burnished Brass and a Poplar Grey.

Next follows a gem-like Pseudargyrotoza conwagana, sorry for the blurring, and then a favourite of mine: the Lesser Angle Shades, a moth which I love dearly because it has quite a substantial patch of blue. I praised the Straw Dot yesterday for its minuscule amount of this very rare colour in UK moths. The LAS is second in this only to the fabulous (but as yet unseen by me) Clifden Nonpareil.

Here's a nice big beast meanwhile: a female Pale Tussock, bigger than the male to a degree often seen in Bamforth's seaside postcards which were printed in my old beat of Holmfirth. Here she is, on her own and then beside her spouse, with a Bamforth image left, to test if my comparison finds favour with you.

Next comes our friend the Snout, nothing new but I always like running their photographs, especially when they turn up their 'nose' - actually palps - at my nightie.  Then a Shoulder-striped Wainscot and an Orange Footman (soon to be re-encountered at Cavendish Hall. Both times I mistook the moth for the closely related but later-flying Dingy Footman but Tony Prichard, Suffolk's county moth recorder, kindly put me right).

Finally, two more favourites to wrap things up: the fagend-like BUff Tip and a Small Magpie micro. It is ages since I have seen a macro Magpie moth which were very common when I began this hobby as a schoolboy in Herefordshire. I hope to meet one again as they are interesting moths which formed the basis of a famous experiment in genetics by Sir Geoffrey Keynes, a surgeon and entomologist who was brother to the more famous Maynard.