Pretty in pink

How good it is to meet an old friend after a long time, even a year or more. As it is with humans, so with moths and I was delighted to have a visit from this lovely Black Arches two nights ago. It wasn't in the trap but on a nearby wall of the house, and I only saw it because of my granddaughter's assiduity in checking the same wall a few days earlier and finding at least five moths which I hadn't noticed. Moreover, it was alongside a Peppered moth whose patterning was even more successful in imitating the colour and texture of the stone.

Can you see them? Not with a passing glance, I think, but here they are from a little closer and then the Black Arches from near-to. They successfully spent the whole day there undeterred by predators, after I gently borrowed the Black Arches for a photo session, to show the hidden glory of its pink body and soft grey underwings. Its camouflage is interesting, relying on the 'dazzle' effect which navies have used to break up the shape of warships. The actual colouring of the moth is less similar to the background of the wall than the Peppered's nut the immediate contrast of black and white in wavy patterns plays pop with the human eye's focussing.

As has happened in previous years, the arrival of Black Arches has coincided with the debut of two other beautifully-patterned and camouflaged, smaller moths: the Marbled Green and the Marbled Beauty, shown in that order below. The Beauty is common but the Green only locally so, like the Black Arches, so I am blessed to get all three. The caterpillar of the Green has the charming habit of constructing a little silken nest into which it retreats after feeding discreetly on the lichen which the adult so much resembles, at night. 

Other arrivals on a warmish night included what I think is a Small Blood-vein, though I got into a muddle between this and the Small Scallop five and six years ago and was helped out by the experts on Upper Thames Moths. Let's see what Edward from Calderdale has to say.

Good to have a fine example of the aptly-named Chestnut, below, and quite a few Brown-line Bright-eyes (as opposed to the Bright-line Brown-eye which came earlier in the year), Yellow-tails, White Satins and Single (Ha!)-dotted Waves. Update: thanks to Edward's point in Comments about the Chestnut not being due until September, I checked this on the unfailing Upper Thames Moths Blog where Martin Townsend (no less; co-author of the Moth Bible) put me right. It's a Least Yellow Underwing. I was misled partly because of my fabled hopelessness with ID-ing anything tricky but also because this is one of the many moths with vivid underwings which keep them hidden. Interestingly, this seems to have led to the great Linnaeus and some of his colleagues giving many of them the character of a young women, either modest or subtly seductive, in the second part of their scientific names; for example, the Large Yellow Underwing is Noctua pronuba, pronuba meaning a bridesmid in Latin, while the Lesser Yellow Underwing is Noctua comes, comes being a Latin term for a mistress. The Least Yellow Underwing, Noctua interjecta, seems to have escaped this exercise unless interjecta is a piece of classical slang that has got lost.

White Satins left, Yellow-tails right. Not the zebra legs of the first and the modest wing dots of the second. And of course the yellow tail.