On we go, plus a sad farewell

Four more moths new for the year have arrived: the Early Grey with its associations with flavoured tea, the Early Thorn in its highly distinctive resting pose and the micros Diurnea fagella, sometimes known romantically as the March Dagger, and Acleris literana (I think; although it may be kochiella; Ben Sale may adjudicate after his very welcome appearance in Comments on my last post). 

This moth can also be known as the Sprinkled Roughwing, another great name. I am whole-heartedly with the minority (of the generally very small number of people who are enthusiastic about micro-moths), who would like to spread their vernacular names. They are much too small to be encumbered by Linnaeus' strange mixture of Latin and Greek and it is very welcome that Wikipedia is using the English names as well. Anyway, Here they all are:

Early Grey, attended by a sinister Ichneumon Wasp

Early Thorn

Diurnea fagella or March Dagger

Acleris literana or Sprinkled Roughwing

Other visitors in the trap included the rich total of six Oak Beautys and I couldn't resist this composite photo of four of them:

Elsewhere in the moth enthusiasts' world, I am very sorry to pass on the news that the Upper Thames Moths blog has stopped on Blogger, after 12 years as a truly wonderful rod and staff for my faltering efforts at species identification. Upper Thames Moths' group is still going strong and the blog itself has moved to a new format on Facebook whither I may follow it although I'm not very keen on the format there.

Apparently, increasing numbers of its users have had issues with Blogger which fortunately haven't affected me here. So there we go; but I owe a huge debt of gratitude to all involved in its production, notably the infinitely tireless, patient and generous blogmaster Dave Wilton, appropriately a retired air traffic controller, whose own traps in Bucks attract a remarkable and thoroughly well-deserved number of moths.

He has been joined in the ranks of the UTM blog's unstintingly helpful people by a range of experts, some of them among the most knowledgable in the UK (Oxford University is on our doorstep) and this network has given me other great moments of pleasure, such as Martin Townsend's tip-off about the emergence of Death's Head hawkmoths from chrysalises found in nearby Kirtlington, which realised one of my life's ambitions - to see this wonderful beast.

Eek! One of the Kirtlington Death's Heads

The blog has also made it easy to track interesting phenomena such as the almost unbelievable realisation of another of my great hopes - for years set on one side as fantasy - of seeing a Clifden Nonpareil. I first clocked their arrival on the UTM blog and so was ready and waiting when they started turning up here.

Holy Grail - the first of more than 20 Clifden Nonpareils which have done me the honour of a visit

On the plus side, the end of the UTM blog coincides with great and welcome changes in the easiness of moth ID via the internet, notably my iPhone's introduction of its 'bugspotter' facility. Dave Wilton rightly warned me to be cautious about relying on this but it has proved reliable with macro-moths and saved me a great deal of annoyance and time. iRecord is another terrific asset.

I sometimes felt that the UTM blog spent too much time on ID and too little on discussions of moth behaviour and that it was always a pity that outsiders such as the wise and very experienced Ben Sale could not post there. But farewell UTM blog, old friend! I have appreciated you more than I can say.