Patience is a virtue

I learned the proverb 'All things come to those who wait' at a tender age, fortunately with an optimistic twist rather than a sense of fatalism. Sure enough, after three visits, a Latticed Heath obliged me with a decent picture of its spread forewings, even though I had disturbed it from the trap and watched it flutter off.

It didn't go far and I saw where it landed on the lawn with its wings obligingly spread rather than folded over its back, crept up and the iPhone co-operated with the correct focus. So here is the moth, in all its pretend-butterfly glory rather than a bit blurry against the trap's black bowl.

Otherwise the night's visitors were unspectacular although there were a lot of them. I puzzled over this very isosceles moth on the left for a while but decided in the end that it must be a scoparia or eudonia micro-moth, almost certainly too life-battered to ID, though I will try.Update: and having tried, I now think it’s Diurnea fagella, an old friend.  Further update: having read Gerry's comment below, I revert to my first thought. He hesitantly puts his money on Eudonia lacustrata and I will back that with mine. I'll also add the moth to my next queries to the marvellous experts on the Upper Thames Moths blog.  Even further update: the expert Dave Wilton rules that sadly it’s too worn to be sure. The equally small chap below, however, I can identify with what for me amounts to certainty as a Garden Rose Tortrix, Acleris variegana. An appropriate name as we have plenty of roses in bloom at the moment and the moth also comes in a wide range of varieties. 

Still in the world of micros, behold the blue-eyed boy, or maybe girl, Crambus perlella with his or her curiously distinctive snout. And after that, I was able to take a leisurely look at the underside of this Black Arches, left, courtesy of a short stay in my Bug Bottle.

In the afternoon, a male Southern Hawker dragonfly got stuck in our greenhouse and rescuing it in an old ice cream box gave me the chance of a pic of it briefly at rest as well as the blurry flying one which I snapped first:

And I was lucky a little later to disturb a Copper Underwing (or the very similar Svensson's Copper Underwing) in the long grass near where the moth trap had been sited the night before. Its unorthodox resting position gave me a glimpse of the underwing which gives it its name. This is almost always concealed and even when teased, the species in my experience is unusually reluctant to show it.

The quotation with which I started this post comes, incidentally, from a poem by Lady Mary Montgomerie Currie who published under the pen-name of Violet Fane. The full quatrain reads rather charmingly, if sadly: 

Ah, all things come to those who wait,’
(I say these words to make me glad),
But something answers soft and sad,
‘They come, but often come too late.’

Luckily, in mothing terms, mine have come in time.