Hitchhiker

 

Penny had a surprise yesterday. It wasn't until she was reaching 50mph on the way home that she noticed this small, brightly-coloured hitchhiker on the windscreen. It survived the journey including a stop at Tesco's where it made itself more comfortable by snuggling into the wiper, above.

I'm checking on Upper Thames Moths but I'm pretty sure that it's a young Lime Hawk moth cattie, a creature which undergoes quite spectacular changes in its appearance as it grows and sheds its skin, ending up with a vivid blue tail horn.  It seems to have settled in to a box of lime leaves, so we may keep it until it pupates.

With my love of blue, I was meanwhile very chuffed to get this focussed close-up of a Common Blue in our neighbouring field whose generously-wide unploughed margins I was praising only yesterday, when it was the turn of a Small Heath. The blue may be common but it uncommonly lovely.

The same goes for the butterflies and male Southern Hawker dragonfly below which are the fruits of my latest visit to the Trap Grounds nature reserve to photograph its wildlife. The Small White in particular appealed to me, with its left forewing torn and folded over by the batterings of life. It was still up for a prolonged series of courtship dances with a potential mate which kept disrupting my efforts to take its picture.

The moth trap meanwhile remains fairly quiet apart from occasional highlights such as the visit earlier this week from the Clifden Nonpareil. Here are a couple of composites: a 1,2,3 of Light Emeralds, the trio seen through the trap's much-used 'transparent' cowl, and a quintet: two Centre-barred Sallows,  a Willow Beauty, an immigrant White-point, a species enjoying an excellent year, and one of the regular, tiny Small Dusty Waves which seem to like living in our house.

Bluey is Back

What a delightful find in the trap this morning: my favourite moth has come back. The Clifden Nonpareil was long my Holy Grail among UK species, a moth of such rarity in the UK for most of my life that I never seriously hoped to encounter one. All that changed in mid-September 2019 as I describe excitedly in my post at the time here.

Since that epic morning, I have had 15 of these large and glorious moths come calling, notable above all for the lovely blue on their wings - dark on the top of the hindwings and a soft duck egg shade on the underneath as in these photos of last night's arrival.  Like almost all big moths, they are usually pliant in co-operating for pictures and their underwings can be revealed in a way which scarcely ever happens with the very common but also very jittery Large Yellow Underwing and its relatives.  

The actual dates of my Clifdens are 3 Sept 2020 (2), 4 Sept 2020, 5 Sept 2020, 10 Sept 2020, 15 Sept 2020 (2), 18 Sept 2020, 21 Sept 2020, 2 Oct 2020, 21 Sept 2021(3) and 5 Sept 2022. So, none last year. I have been mildly concerned that the triumphant re-appearance of this moth across southern England might have slowed or even gone on the retreat.

Instead, I think that my rather limited trapping late last Summer is more likely to have missed nights when the moths were flying. It will be interesting to see whether I get more over the next five weeks - August 29 is easily my earliest record for the species and, as you can see form the list above, my latest was not until 2nd October.

Last night's Nonpareil was - classically - in the second-to-last eggbox I inspected, in a trap whose visitors were otherwise thin in number and variety - mostly Brimstones, Light Emeralds, Green Carpets and above all Snouts, the commonest species at the moment. I checked out its underside first and then gradually tickled and nudged it into revealing that lovely, shining blue.

After carefully tucking the moth away inside a gloomy bush at the end of the photography session, I spotted a fluttering outside our back door and discovered this rather battered Herald moth, a very fine species which adorns the spine of the first edition of the Moth Bible. They come here infrequently but regularly enough.

In the trap meanwhile, I have had a succession of reasonable moths with constant predictable new arrivals for the year among the long-standing regulars.  Examples below include the Centre-barred Sallow and the Copper Underwing in the top row, the former one of a group of orangey-yellow relations in the Sallow family which signal that Autumn with its similar colours is sadly not far away. The Copper Underwing is even more reluctant than its Yellow cousins to show its fine hindwings. I will have to resort again to taking a video as I did recently of a Large Yellow Underwing with my granddaughter.

The distinctively-marked brown moth in the bottom row is a Turnip Moth and its neighbour is that lovely regular here, a Bordered Beauty.  The busier composite below shows, from top left: a Common or Lesser Common Rustic, a Small Square-spot, a browny mystery, a second Small Square-spot, a Dotted Pug, the devastating Box Moth and in the bottom row, two Lunar Thorns (complete with tiny moons on their wings) on either side of a Light Emerald.

In the world of butterflies, meanwhile, a rather unrewarding wander along the generously uncultivated margin of our local Big Field did at least produce this Small Heath, the only one of the regular field 'browns' which had eluded me this year. One of my great-nieces also used her eagle eyes to spot the chrysalis of I know not what on a wall near her home in east London - pic second below.

And elsewhere in the wild(ish) world, I came across this small frog locally and a flock of Pied Wagtails in the garden of Friends House on super-busy Euston Road in the heart of London.

Clickety-click

A curious beetle leads my post today, salvaged from water and a bit dopey but otherwiese apparently unhurt I think that it is a Click Beetle of some kind - so at least says the iBug facility on my son's 'phone - but which one of the UK's many species it is, I cannot say. I see from online references, however, that its name comes from the click it gives when it makes a little jump. Mine was too stunned by its recent immersion to show this talent off.

It came on a day of drenching rain for the whole morning including the last three hours or so of the moth trap's stint, and so my granddaughter and I were faced with quite a few soggy eggboxes. This made the task of checking the moths a little harder and more dispiriting, so I went back over them later in the day in case we had missed anything. Then I had a third check before stashing everything away and giving the moths a break last night.

I'm glad that I did because it was only on this third audit that I spotted the dart-shaped moth above and below - small enough to be a micro which may be why I hadn't noticed it the first two times. Or maybe I had looked insufficiently closely and dismissed it as the rather similar and currently very common Straw Dot. In fact it is a Pinion-streaked Snout, a little macro moth which has only visited me once before, in 2018, five months before the pandemic.

Of course, I may have hosted it on other occasions but failed to recognise it as I so nearly did yesterday.  Meanwhile here is another nice arrival, an Old Lady moth. This is my top candidate for renaming in our more enlightened times.

Next a Chinese Character moth with its highly distinctive position at rest which accounts for my alternative name for it of the Bird Poo Moth. The Chinese character is the very small silvery tracery in the shape of a trident which is the Chinese pictogram for 'mountain'.

My composite shows a yet to be ID-ed micro, a Flame Shoulder with an attractive pinkish tinge, a Flounced Rustic,  a couple of very differently coloured Snouts, a Light Emerald, a Marbled Beauty, another Light Emerald and a second micro needing ID. I have homework to do.

Finally the Box Moth is still around, doubtless the result of more bingeing by the species' caterpillars on box hedges whose owners must be tearing out their hair at the arrival of the resourceful immigrant species in the UK.

Beautiful stinger

I was reading up today about some of the rare close relatives of the Red Underwing which I featured yesterday and a detail about one in particular caught my eye. There has only ever been one Minsmere Crimson Underwing found in the UK, resting on the outside of a light trap in the Minsmere bird reserve in Suffolk in September 20 years ago. Much of the catch inside the trap, says the Moth Bible, 'had been destroyed by hornets.'

Cue my visit to my own trap this morning after a chilly night for the time of the year when I was not expecting rich pickings. Bold as brass on the eggbox nearest the lampholder was the very fine hornet above. Luckily, it did not seem to have destroyed anything.

I have read that hornets are very unaggressive even though they pack a nasty punch in their stings. That has certainly always been my experience. When I find one like this, I always take out its chosen eggbox carefully and chuck it into a bush. Each time serves to remind me to be careful when turning over eggboxes in the Summer. Even the most docile hornet would object to having one of my pudgy fingers squashing it.

My favourite moth in last night's catch was this exquisite Shuttle-shape Dart, a common species but I have never seen an example as fresh and clearly defined as this one with such a strong contrast between the white 'helmet' and delicate silvery shuttle shapes and the velvety black body. As far as I can tell, it is a female of the standard species but it certainly stood out in the trap.

Next we have a Flounced Rustic, a moth which will be common in the eggboxes for the next month, and then a Canary-shouldered Thorn, as lovely as its name suggests. Below that is a sleek micro which I will ID shortly after I've taken up the morning cuppa and settled down with my Micro-moths Bible.

Below is a Setaceous (or 'bristly') Hebrew Character, the adjective referring to some tiny organ which needs a magnifying glass or even microscope to show. And then I think a small Square-spot and finally a couple which elude my clumsy efforts at ID-ing this type of medium-sized and predominantly brown moth. But I will keep on trying.

Petticoats

 

No sooner had I posted my last episode, with its reflections on how jittery the 'underwing' moths tend to be, than a Large Yellow Underwing arrived in the trap and proved the point. My granddaughter luckily had the simple but sensible idea of filming it and then taking a screenshot of a still from the video, rather than attempting an ordinary one-off photo.

Her plan worked, above, and in spite of the inevitable blurring, the image shows the fine, golden petticoat of an ordinarily brown, black and rather drab-looking large moth. Meanwhile, she was intrigued by the two pages of assorted 'red' underwings from the Moth Bible, showing the importance of seeing the hindwings because of the pretty slight differences in the patterning.

I am only likely ever to see the standard Red Underwing although one of the Crimson ones has appeared a few times on the Upper Thames Moths blog. So I will keep checking. Meanwhile the eggboxes have been interesting enough although both quantity and variety remain down this year compared to previous seasons.

Below we have a delicate Common White Wave, a Common Plume, a Burnished Brass form tutti and a Common Swift (lots of Commoners about), a Blood-vein - a moth reported to be declining in the UK but very common here this year - a Willow Beauty and an unusual view of a Pale Prominent, almost always seen at rest when it looks very like a broken twig.

Then we have a Dart or Rustic which I need to ID or get ID-ed, a Rosy Rustic, a Snout, a Tree-lichen Beauty, a second Common Wave, the 'heart' micro, whoops another pic of the Pale Prominent, an Angle Shades and a second elusive-ID Rustic or Dart. More info soon, I hope.

And finally, some pleasantly-coloured Thorn moths teetering on the outside of the trap and on my granddaughter's hand; the first two are Dusky Thorn and the latter four September Thorn. I think.

Red Moths in the Sunshine

A pleasant surprise at this time of the year is the daylight appearance of one of our larger moths, the initially modest-looking Red Underwing. It keeps its glories hidden when at rest when it resembles a small Vulcan V-bomber with its camouflage-patterned grey forewings forming a neat triangle.

Its arrival is an annual event but still startles me after so many years of running the light trap, probably because of the fairly routine species of moth which come to the eggboxes during August. This year it was a neighbour who alerted me by sending the top picture of two moths roosting typically in a shady corner which he wanted to identify.

I obliged and then went out into the garden through our back door which opened with an unusual flutter and plop. There on the threshold, upside down, lay a fine and almost certainly newly-emerged Red Underwing, alive but clearly stunned by its fall. I have never seen this before; moths usually get their flying skills going in a tumble but big ones like these need time to exercise their wing muscles if they have been asleep. It was providential for me because normally they are very unwilling to show their brilliant petticoats, just like the much commoner Yellow Underwings which unfailingly whirr off when my granddaughter tries to coax them on to her fingers.

So here it is, with the bold warning colour almost fully-exposed above and then, below, tempted without any problems to a photogenic spot. After a few minutes, it recovered its powers of movement and crept onwards up the wall to settle just below the gutter. Three hours later, it was still there, motionless, as dusk fell.

The following afternoon, I was washing-up in the kitchen before heading out to do some gardening in the sunshine, when a major amount of fluttering and swooping announced the presence of another of the moths. They are happy to fly by day, which does at least give vivid glimpses of the scarlet, and this one rather unusually in my experience, perched on an electric cable up the wall and basked like a Red Admiral.  Happily, the grandchildren had arrived for a week's holiday with us, and I whizzed in and got them all out to admire this singular moth.

They were also pleased, later than evening, to see our cat Taco watching the trap; interesting that his eyes allow him to look at the very powerful bulb in a way which would very quickly dazzle our own. I think that he was watching both the occasional moth jinking in and also a pair of bats circling above, but he didn't dare creep any closer.

Newcomer number seven

                             

One of the moths which I left unidentified in my last post turns out to be another new species for my garden, the seventh this year. I asked for help on the marvellous Upper Thames Moths blog, apologising for being so dim about what looked like some commonplace sort of Rustic species, and the all-knowing expert in charge of that site, Dave Wilton, identified this as the only locally common Olive. Hooray.

I thought briefly that my other failure to identify was an eighth newcomer, a Cabbage moth. I was right in my suggestion but wrong to think that I had never had it here. I checked my list of species and discovered that I was visited by one in our first year here, 2013, and then a Cabbage Moth caterpillar appeared on florets of home-grown broccoli in our fridge four years later.

My latest favourite in the trap meanwhile has been this Beautiful China Mark micro, above, Nymphula nitidulata, a moth which flourishes near watercourses of which we have many, including the river Cherwell and the Oxford Canal.

Other arrivals are shown above: Bloodvein, Angle Shades, Common or Lesser Common Rustic, Coronet, a Plume micro whose exact ID I must pursue, Chestnut, Burnished Brass form juncta, Green Carpet and Whitepoint. Meanwhile I enjoyed stalking my first Common Blue butterfly of the year in the UK along the canal towpath where it had taken a shine to a scrap of hosepipe.

It distracted me from getting a good picture of a water vole swimming across the canal with frantic urgency, a very dangerous moment if there had been a heron around. The best I could do with the camera was this blurry snap of it almost reaching safety, below.

And finally a sad photo of a wren mysteriously dead on our lawn. I'm glad to say, however, that our garden wren population is flourishing and they are constantly trying to find out where I hide the moths after inspecting the eggboxes in the morning.