Trebles all round

A nice, distinctively-patterned moth came here the night before the Great Clifden Nonpareil Excitement, which naturally took priority in my blogging timetable. Apologies therefore that this post hops backwards to last Sunday night.  Anyway, above is a second-generation Treble Bar. I have mild difficulties with its name; Double-bar would seem a more likely candidate, but there we are. It is one of a quartet, alongside the Lesser Treble-bar, which is extremely similar and requires a close look at the male genitalia to tell the difference, the Purple Treble-bar and the Manchester Treble-bar.

The last, pictured left courtesy of Butterfly Conservation's excellent website, has a place in my affections because of the modest role of moths in defending the good name of Manchester as a centre of culture and not just factories and toil. It shouldn't be necessary to make this case but the prejudice expressed by, for example, Lord Tennyson in his sneer 'We are not cotton-spinners all/ But some love England and her honour yet' is tenacious.

As you can see, the Manchester Treble-bar is something of a colourful star, with its flashes of purply maroon, just as the great city has many beautiful buildings, parks and nearby countryside. It was a second eponymous moth, Schiffermulleria woodiella, an almost equally bright little micro shown right, which prompted my former paper the Manchester Guardian to rebuke Tennyson. There are only three specimens of this moth in the world, one of them in the Manchester Museum, one in London's Natural History Museum and one in Melbourne, Australia, and it was the subject of a symposium by the Royal Entomological Society in 1951. 

If you'll forgive the plug, I described the episode in my book True North as follows:

Back at the trap, this pleasant Light Emerald was perched under the cowl and the eggbox residents included the Autumnal Rustic shown below. Also on the cowl was the large, dart-shaped micro Udea lutealis.

The moth-in-the-hand which follows is one of those Dart-y types whose ID causes me endless grief. I will try to find time to track it down. Update: I hereby pronounce it to be a Flounced Rustic, a moth which I have overlooked before at this time of the year. Please correct me if I am wrong.

And finally, the sad remains of an Oak Hook-tip, a moth which came to the UK as an immigrant until the 1920s when it established itself and has subsequently spread ever further north in the way that the much more spectacular Nonpareil now seems ready to do.