Happy Birthday

The moths have an excellent record of coming good on my birthday - today - and this year, it was a pleasure to welcome the year's first example of that lovely moth the Coronet, above and immediately below. It has the most wonderfully subtle shades of green; my favourite colour in UK moths given the almost complete absence of blue.

In the past, May 18 has often brought me an entirely new species and I was initially unable to recognise the tiny triangular scrap below. Some sort of very small Carpet? Or one of the rather rare Pinions?  I looked in vain through the Moth Bible and was on the verge of posting its picture on my unfailing fallback option, the Upper Thames Moths blog. 

But then I bethought myself: completely new species are a real rarity now that we have been in Oxfordshire for six summers. So I nipped back out to the trap, now stashed away from a pesky robin in our shed, for a further check. To my relief the moth was still there and it had also adopted a new resting position which cleared things up. 

Silly me! A micro-moth. Sure enough, their Bible revealed the little chap to be a Twenty Plume, which first came to me in Leeds in 2010 and then here in 2014 and later, including one occasion when the reason for its name was clearly shown when it fluttered on to the computer screen.  The same thing happened when I popped it briefly in a transparent box and photographed it against the light. Hard to believe the difference between the two views of the same insect - the one below and the ones above.  If you count the plumes, there are indeed ten on each side (plus two legs showing through the almost translucent wings)

There were plenty of other nice arrivals, as the weather warms up and Summer gets under way. My first composite below shows, clockwise from top left: Heart and Dart, Shuttle-shape Dart, the immigrant White-point (I think) and Early Grey.

Next come two Common Swifts and after them an assortment of micros, a pug and a carpet which I hope to return to later.

Then two contrasting colourways of that very familiar immigrant (and possibly now settler), the Silver Y and finally the topside and underwings of what I think is a Small Seraphim, plus that long-standing favourite of mine, a White Ermine.  

And just to end my Birthday News, here is a pic and a mini-film of an ant taking a dead fly home for tea in our greenhouse. Yuk! But impressive.