Trap on holiday

The moth trap's long holiday continues with lightning forecast for yet another night tonight and my respect for electricity causing me to play safe. But that said, my life is certainly not moth-free, thanks to the eagle eyes of Penny the indoor-moth-spotter and various other family events relating to the insect world.

My first two pictures are candidates for a proposed chapter in my granddaughter's book Emily and Grandpa's Private Book of Moths called Moths Where They Shouldn't Be. That certainly applies to this Common Swift investigating our kettle, which was risking an unpleasant death. Update - Sorry, it's an Orange Swift.  Many thanks as always to Edward in Comments.

Our kitchen has been the principal moth magnet in the last few days with the Common Plume, above, spending an entire two days examining one of our spanking new cupboards. A piece of netting which I sometimes use for jam-making also attracted the Holly Blue, below, just outside the door. It was so absorbed that I had no trouble getting a close-up picture of its lovely powdery-blue underwing, but this species is incredibly unwilling to show its beautiful mauvey blue topwings. In the end, I provoked it into flight and screenshot these stills. Blurry - sorry - but I hope that they give you an idea of the colour which the butterfly is so keen to hide.

It was much easier to get pictures for two new specimens in the granddaughter's Collection of Insects Found Dead: this Peacock and Small Tortoiseshell which had got into an outhouse but failed to find the way out. More cheerfully, I found them while liberating a second Peacock which was fluttering madly against the closed window.  It was tricky to photograph against the light. For your interest, I've added a second picture where I pressed the screen where the butterfly was, illuminating some of its colours but losing everything else in a spooky glow.

My older sister meanwhile sent wonderful pictures from her holiday in France of a Two-tailed Pasha, Europe's gaudiest butterfly. Definitely worth spending 14 days in quarantine to have the chance of seeing something like that. They prompted me to look up my own snaps - the composite pic below - of the only one I've ever seen, on holiday in Croatia. When I mentioned it on the blog back in 2011, a reader sent in a vivid description of watching Pashas and Cleopatra butterflies actually driving swallows away from a muddy puddle where they wanted to suck up the salts in peace.

I won't go into gruesome detail but I am fighting a ruthless war against 'Cabbage White' caterpillars on our Purple-sprouting and kale, as well as nasturtiums which the Small and Green-veined Whites seem to prefer. Meanwhile, the grandchildren have sent me a film of a high-speed Cinnabar caterpillar with its nuclear radiation warning colours. It's poisonous for birds. You can see its few but irritating hairs in the clip too.

I'm not alone in hunting garden prey. I noticed the wasp fighting with something in our veg patch the other day. It flew away after I'd taken only one picture, below, but I think that its victim was very small green spider - Araniella cucurbitina maybe, the Green Orb-weaver.