Colourful crew

 

Some lovely moths are coming now that the weather is getting warmer, including a fabulous Bank Holiday with sunshine from Friday morning to Monday night. I have added Holly Blues and Orange-tips to my growing list of butterflies. Brimstones, Peacocks, Small Tortoiseshells, Commas, Speckled Woods and Green-veined White abound and it will not be too long before we have Marbled Whites on the edge of the big field next door.  Meanwhile, welcome to the Waved Umber neatly clinging to the rim of the trap's bowl above.

The Swallow Prominent has jetted in too while below we have one of the dreary brown triangles which I can never identify and a much more interesting-looking and in this case particularly well-patterned Powdered Quaker. Update: Whoops! Senior moment. As Pembrokeshire Birds kindly points out in Comments (below), this is a Dotted Chestnut, a much more interesting moth. Sorry!

Next a composite of thumbnail-sized pugs, Brindled mostly I think with one Double-striped down in the bottom right-hand corner. There may be a couple of Oak-trees in there too. I'm sorry to give up in despair.

Much more to my liking is the Fristed Green shown below, a handsome and blessedly distinctive moth which it's a pleasure to welcome. And my final composite shows a selection of excellent moths found by the visiting student on his first night using the trap about five miles away on the edge of Oxford. I particularly envy his Chocolate-tip with its unmistakable shape and Easter name. He also very generously gave Penny and myself a very large Easter egg when he brought the trap back before heading off to university. His Brimstone moth adds Easter chick cheer to the colourway of the catch and there's also a Brindle Beauty, a Shuttle-shape Dart, a Hebrew Character (the most common moth in my trap at the moment) and what I am pretty sure is a Flame Carpet. His next stop for trapping is Kenya where the moths will be fabulous.