HMS Moth

The Old Lady moths of Kidlington caught my imagination over the weekend and I managed to find time, as proposed in my last post here, to mount my first ever maritime mothing expedition. Using our dinghy Dolores, Empress of Thrupp, seemed to be the best way of getting closer and better pictures of the extraordinary roosts of the moth. So great was my excitement that my iPhone put up that message about not receiving data when you're driving. Now that's power rowing for you.

I got to the bridge - top photo in the trio just above - in good time, partly thanks to a kindly gent who helped me haul Dolores past Roundham lock. Then I steadied the boat as best I could and took the sequence of photos below; still not brilliant in the dire lighting conditions, but better than the ones I managed previously by hopping on to passing narrow boats. The bottom right pic above, btw, is a specimen Old Lady which came here a couple of summers ago.

The three above are of the large cluster, which contains at least 150 moths, and the one below of the smaller one. Both are centred on fissures in the bridge's stonework where the first arrivals, now partly buried beneath another layer, must have snuggled in.

The moths' behaviour has now been explained on the Upper Thames Moths blog by Martin Townend, co-author of the Moth Bible. Uncomfortable in the very warm weather, they have found a cool, dark place to 'aestivate', or summer-hibernate, a process which takes them into a state of diapause, or suspended development. Like antennae, this is one of the relatively few attributes of being a moth which might make a human envious. It does me.

In my amateurish efforts to aid science, I am now trying to assemble a large-scale picture of each cluster to assist a count of numbers. If only the Old Lady were a more distinctive moth.

Incidentally, bearing in mind my heading for this post, there actually was an HMS Moth. She was one of the Insect Class of Royal Navy river gunboats, built in 1915 in Sunderland alongside her sister-ship Mantis. She served in Mesopotamia, Iraq, as well as the White Sea in northern Russia before going out to the Far East. Here she suffered the unusual fate of being turned into a Japanese gunboat after the fall of Singapore when she was scuttled in the harbour but later raised and repaired. Renamed the Suma, after a Japanese beauty spot, she was sunk by a mine in the last year of the war.