Good company

The warm weather has done its stuff with a clutch of excellent new arrivals including the handsome and well-antenna-ed Lunar Marble Brown above and the rather similar, fur-coaty Nut-tree Tussock below. Following the latter are the very different Pine Beauty and Waved Umber which usually start appearing here in early May, so this season continues to be an early one.

The locally common Frosted Green, a moth which never came calling in Leeds, has also made its 2019 debut with a pair arriving a fortnight earlier than previously. I guess that at any moment we will experience the nasty nips of our main entomological nuisance in this part of the world, the Blandford Fly, usually a May pest. Here's the Frosted Green below, whose name is accurate if you look closely and in certain lights; and the further North the moth is found, the greener it becomes.  The patterning on the moth is variable and, as you can see, my two are slightly different in their various whorls, dots, dashes and zigzags.

Also in the trap: this Plume moth immediately below, followed by one of the darker versions of the Shuttle-shape Dart - named after the very accurate miniature weaving shuttle pattern on its forewings - and a little cluster of pug moths; the bottom two are V-pugs (again, named for their forewing marks) but I will need to spend a bit of time with my pug book to identify the others.  Or try to; as regular readers know, this is not my strongest point.  

It's seldom that moths are the only creatures in the trap. In the past, their companions have included wasps, hornets and even an angry but sadly well-fed robin. Last night saw the other creatures below: a Daddy Longlegs, two caddis flies and some sort of curious fly which a passing dipterist may one day kindly ID.  All are going to be useful for the embroidered and knitted insect-themes cornice which I am currently making for the grandchildren's treehouse.  Pictures will appear here in due course.

I can't resist just showing you a couple of glimpses from the wonderfully sunlit weeks which Penny and I have just had in the Lake District with our wider family (but not the moth trap; there wasn't room with all the other baggage. We took stacks of the warm/wet weather equipment usually prudent for a Lakes holiday and ending up using none of it).

Finally, the excellent entomologists of Tom Bedford's family - his blog Out of the Blue Sky always makes wonderful and informative reading - have also been hatching great-grandchildren of my Emperor. His camera is much better than mine and he has kindly provided the two pictures below.  I wish I could get as close to the marvellous detail of the scales.  One day...