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.
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