Colour splash

I put out the trap last night for the first time in over a week and initially thought that I had been rewarded only with an assembly of dullish brown and grey moths - worthy characters all of them but not very exciting. But the lower eggboxes contained some nice surprises.

You can see how big the Red Underwing is compared with the Orange Swift behind and the Snout (Pinocchio nose just discernible) below

The Red Underwing in my first three pictures was the most satisfying; an annual visitor but always a favourite, partly because of its greater size than most of my visitors and partly because of those very fine scarlet underwings. These are not usually shown at rest and thus the moth requires a little teasing to get a photograph of them. It will only take so much of this and, after a brief spell of wing-flexing and whirring, this one was off.  But watching it fly at a leisurely pace into the shelter of a plum tree was an enjoyable experience too, the scarlet clearly visible as it fluttered away, possibly serving as a warning signal to the awakening birds which duly left it alone.

The other particularly attractive arrivals were the two metallically-scaled moths below, a Burnished Brass of the form juncta - where the two main areas of reflective and refractive scales are joined by a narrow line across the brown - and a Lempke's Gold Spot. Taxonomists are still trying to decide whether to declare juncta and the alternative form aurea to be distinct species rather than varieties of the same moth, as happened when Lempke's Gold Spot was declared different from the original and extremely similar Gold Spot. Good luck to them in their deliberations; the rest of us can just enjoy the beauty of these little creatures of the night.

Other pleasures on the guest list, below, included the tiny, bird-dropping-like Chinese Character on the trap's cowl, the 'character' being the silvery-white squiggle on the grey patch in mid-wing, the Dusky Thorn on the bulbholder and two Willow Beauties showing the very slight variations in pattern which always get me in a tizzy over separating this kind of moth from other, very similar-looking species.