Butterfly - or moth?

The Vapourer is a fierce-looking moth with various distinctions: it has a very fine caterpillar which I once met while working on my grandchildren's treehouse, the female is flightless and resembles a woodlouse and the male, which is quite a good-sized insect, flies by day as well as night. This last characteristic has led to another interesting phenomenon: it is quite often mistaken for a Brown Hairstreak butterfly and vice-versa. 

 

By coincidence, we were trekking back to our car at the Premier Inn in Newhaven, after crossing on the ferry from Dieppe, I saw a Brown Hairstreak for the first time in my life. This makes 2022 something of an annus mirabilis for me in butterfly terms because in July, I saw the even rarer Black Hairstreak for the first time. To enjoy such new encounters at the grand old age of 72 is a privilege and of course a great pleasure. Here's the Brown Hairstreak, which gave me a very brief chance to take its picture before zooming off:

 

It was enjoying some not-at-all obvious virtue of the very ordinary but attractive shrubbery planted round Premier Inn car parks. I saw it first in flight and thought that it was, not a Vapourer moth, but a Comma butterfly because the topwing marks and very vivid underwings which alas I could not photo, are a bright orange. Here it is again, from further away:

Talking of butterflies, over in France I saw but also failed to snap a Clouded Yellow and some kind of chequered or grizzled skipper but I did get this reasonable picture of a delicious blue - Common Blue, I think, although it seemed unusually small.  Perhaps it was an omen of the Clifden Nonpareil awaiting me back in England and described in my last post.

In the moth trap subsequently, I was visited by this nicely architectural Feathered Gothic moth and nearby I found a Copper Underwing which had sadly called it a day. Like yesterday's Holly Blue, this gave me a chance to see the eponymous underwing which the moth rigorously keeps hidden when alive and well. Sadly, the moth was in too battered a state for me to make any sense of the fine distinctions between the standard form an Svensson's Copper Underwing which is very closely related.

And to conclude, some other arrivals on Saturday night: a Gold Triangle micro, Hypsopygia costalis, showing its full, pint-sized glory, the hedge-destroying Box Tree micro, Cydalima perspectalis, a neat Grayling, a Pebble Hook-tip from below and an Oak Hook-tip from above, a Common Marbled Carpet with its lovely varied colouring on a small canvas,  and a Willow Beauty.