Lichen liker

Another new moth for me came this morning - and a very attractive one with a suitably attractive name: the Tree-lichen Beauty.  It's one of a number of moths which are colonising very successfully in the UK after first arriving only recently. The first record for Oxfordshire was only in 2015.

It's a relative of the Marbled Green, a moth which is only locally common but comes in some numbers to my light; here are a couple with their cousin above and below. Update: thanks very much to my Commentor, below; the second companion of the T-lB is a Marbled Beauty, rather than Green. So we have all three pretty cousins here. 

Prior to 1991, the Tree-lichen Beauty was well-known on the Continent but a great rarity here. There were only two records from Disley in Cheshire in 1859 and one from Hastings in 1873.  Then the immigration began, with 45 arrivals by 2001. When my first edition of the Moth Bible was published in 2003, the moth was classified simply as 'Immigrant'. By the third edition in 2017 it had become 'Immigrant, Colonist'. The discovery of five in one Kentish garden in 2002 was an early suggestion that it found English lichen - and warmer weather - to its liking and had started to breed.

Another pleasant surprise in this morning's trap was a regular visitor, the micro Pyrausta aurata, in an unusual resting position, showing the rather waspish striped body which it usually keeps modestly concealed beneath its wings.

Here's another micro, too, below, which I'm reckoning to be Acrobasis advenella, another new one for me (though since it is classified as 'Common', I suspect that I have just overlooked it before.

And finally a nice Peppered moth, the original rather than melanic version but with quite a dark colourway compared to most