Making a beeline

Every so often, the moths serve up a treat, even after all my years of studying, trapping and photographing them. Breakfast outdoors on a brilliantly sunny and very hot morning this week was a perfect example. We were joined by a moth which I have never seen in the UK.

I thought at first that it was a Hummingbird Hawk, a regular visitor here in such conditions and always a lovely moth to watch as it nectars at a distance from flowers. I had left my iPhone indoors and so went to find it without inspecting the moth closely, while P got on with her breakfast. When I got back, the moth had gone.

As is the way with such things, and as I have learned from long experience, it returned again almost immediately. At first it had been nectaring on ceanothus and lilac - the swags of blooms on the latter give even human beings great heady gusts of scent. Now it turned its attention to aubrietia and dwarf stock.  Constantly hovering, these insects are difficult to photo at any form of rest and I wasn't helped by the dazzling sunlight and the way that my glasses have lost their grip and slide down my nose. But it was clearly one of the two Bee Hawkmoths, the Broad-and Narrow-banded, which are found in the UK and both have the third strongest degree of protection as Nationally Scarce (B) which comes after Red Data Book for the very rarest and Nationally Scarce (A).  A check with the Moth Bible established that it was a Narrow-banded one.

The photos are certainly enough to satisfy the record-keepers, which is handy because I think that this is only the third record for Oxfordshire this century, after one in 2007 and a continuing number from a colony of caterpillars discovered and monitored on field scabious, the species' main foodplant, near Faringdon from 2017.  Given that there are bound to be plenty more which go un-noticed or are mistaken for bees or hornets (though they are bigger than both by some margin) or for Hummingbird Hawks, this is greatly encouraging.  It also takes my number of visiting hawk moth species to nine, which is way beyond my expectations when we moved from Leeds eight years ago.