Hawks more

My courteous farewells to those great stars of the annual moth parade, the Hawks, have proved even more premature than I thought. After the persistence of the first generation of these mighty creatures, the last of which came on 13th August in the form of a Poplar Hawk, a vigorous second brood is now out and about. It first showed itself in the form of this pristine Poplar which was in the trap yesterday morning, sound asleep as is always the case with the hawks, except the Pine which seems to have a more nervous disposition than the others. I reported it on the excellent Upper Thames Moths blog whose expert Dave Wilton commented that second generation Poplars were not specially unusual but the only other types he'd had as a visitor were the Elephant Hawk, back in August 2015, and a couple of Small Elephants, in 2010 and 2017. He concluded: "So there's a very slim chance that your Poplar may not be the last."

He was right!  look at my visitors this morning.  There was one Poplar on the outside of the trap bowl, a second inside and two Elephant Hawks in the eggboxes, one of them already quite worn for a second generation moth.

This has been altogether a cheerful experience, and there was a good haul of moths last night when the weather was so delicious that P and I had supper outside and lingered over it until late, serenaded by music from a pub down the road. Plenty of the nocturnal visitors were on a wall and foliage nearby, rather than in the eggboxes, as with this Thorn and Rustic below and the other chap on the spuds; sorry not to have full IDs for these at this relatively early hour. I will update later.

Inside the trap, there were abundant Rustics, Hebrew Chyaracters and Yellow Underwings of various sorts, but also a welcome contingent of delicate and lighter moths including this Wave which I'm not quite sure about - Riband I think, though it seems rather heavily smudged. Then a couple of nice Green Carpets and a Double-striped Pug.

Among the larger and browner/greyer brethren, we have this  Square-spot Rustic, a Silver Y and - in a slightly higher league of both size and patterning - a Pebble Prominent.

And to end with, on the alert on our young beech hedge, a nicely-spotted spider, I think maybe a Garden Orb. The females of this species do most of the trapping and eating while the smaller males lurk nearby and finish off the scraps.