December already?

 

I was going to blame my ever-increasing age, because I had pretty much forgotten this phenomenon from last year. But then I remembered that I forget it every year and have done since I first switched the moth trap on back in 2005. What is it? The fact that far from petering out, the moths put on a great show of numbers and variety as October hands over to November. 

There is one novelty this year, shown in my first picture. This is my first December Moth of 2025, adding to the muddle over months, with November and Autumnal Moths already in residence for quite a while. My previous earliest was October 30 last year so that's only been beaten by three days, but the debut of many species has crept backwards on the calendar in recent years. Will this in due course be definitively linked to global warming?

Meanwhile here's one of the afore-mentioned Autumnal, November or Pale November Moths mentioned above, slumbering dangerously close to a parasitic Ichneumon Fly. Below, behold three brownish brethren from the varied and plentiful guest list: a Large Yellow Underwing, a Turnip Moth and a Red-line Quaker. 

Moving along the colour spectrum to green, we have a metallicy Green-brindled Crescent and two of that wonderful moth the Merveille du Jour, one of them snuggled up by a wasp just as my first this year, described in my last post, was guarded by a hornet. Lastly we have a Red Green Carpet, a very pretty and nicely-streamlined little moth.

Another carpet moth (originally named from Chinese patterned carpets arriving in 18th century England for the first time) is doing very well after colonising in the UK only relatively recently. Here it is below: the Cypress Carpet with its distinctive black flashes. They come every night just now.

A few more: three or four White-points come every night, the Black Rustic more seldom and the Feathered Thorn infrequently.  Finally, we have a last - I am pretty certain - Sallow of the year and a couple of Autumnla/November moths, one of them closeish up and showing how delicate their superficially boring grey patterning is.

Cautiously marvellous

 

The last Top Moth of the year has arrived as I hoped that it would, the wonderfully coloured and patterned Merveille du Jour. It has a high tolerance of pretty chilly Autumn weather and it certainly lifts the spirits of those of us creatures who prefer the warmth. Mind you, this year's arrival came in unusual circumstances as you can see above.

Our local hornets' nest sends a delegation to the light trap most nights at the moment and when I lifted the lid, a little later than usual, one of them was wakeful enough to scuttle under the protective cover of an eggbox. My kitchen tongues were to hand and I very gingerly moved the boxes, one by one. To my joy, I saw the Merveille; but it was in the very eggbox which the hornet and chosen as a hiding place.

Luckily the fearsome-looking insects are commendably docile in my experience and this one made no attempt to ward me off. I got my photo and then carefully placed the box under a beech hedge so that I could examine the other ones undisturbed. I was pretty sure from previous experience that it would buzz off within an hour so, hornets being marvels of the day ratrher than the night, and I've had no instances of the hornets attacking sleeping moths.

So it proved and I was able to move the Merveille to a drystone wall with lichen. Can you spot it above?  Here it is below from closer-up. It stayed there until lunchtime at least.

There has been quite a rush-hour of other moths in the last week, including the lurking Turnip and Sallow moths below, a micro whose ID I am still pursuing and another rather fine late Autumn regular, Blair's Shoulder-knot.

 

Here are a couple more pictures of the Shoulder-knot, the first one alongside an Autumnally russet Beaded Chestnut.

I've also played host to an Acleris variegana micro, known in the vernacular as the Garden Rose Tortrix though to me as the Love-heart Moth, a delicate and very pink-toned immigrant Vestal and a Brown-spot Pinion.

Here are a contrasting couple of many November/Winter moths, easy to dismiss as small, grey nonentities but often with clear and delicate patterns as in thie first example. The second is more the norm. Then we have a teeny-weeny Least Carpet and another micro, Carcina quercana or the Oak Longhorn, obligingly snoozing on the trap's transparent cowl and therefore shown from both above and below.

Finally, who knew that Green-brindled Crescents had eyes in the back of their heads? Not even me, until I took this pic of one snuggled deep inside an eggbox cone.

Multi-colour

I can't have enough of the Green-brindled Crescent  at this time of year and especially when three slightly different forms arrive on one night. Here they are, above: a dark version of the form cappuccino on the left, cappuccino itself in the middle, apppropriately coffee-coloured, and the standard type on the right, the one with the shiny metallic green scales which are such a glory of the species. I hope that you can't have too much of them either.

 

Plenty of variety continues besides. Above, we have a Turnip moth and below, a Shuttle-shape Dart, followed by a very small Willow Beauty, a Cypress Pug and a Cypress Carpet (both relatively new to the UK but flourishing mightily).

And to round things off today, Here's a richly-coloured Satellite and a Beaded Chestnut.  Loads of November/Winter moths are coming to the light too, so the end of the annual mothing season is drawing nigh although here are still one or two of the year's stars to come.

All shapes and colours

 

The seasons draw on and Autumn has arrived with glorious leaf colours but colder nights. Never say die with the moth trap, however. There are some lovely creatures still about.  My top picture shows one of the best of them, the Green-brindled Crescent which I featured a couple of weeks ago and whose fascinating history I touched on in a post back in 2020, Covid times. It has an apt flying companion at the moment, The Red-green Carpet which came in considerable numbers for several nights last week.

They were joined by the Satellite below with its marking so like one of the simpler of the aliens in the handheld game Space Invaders which was one of the first computer games I ever played.  That's followed below by the familiar micro-moth Carcina quercana which features on the cover of the Micromoth Bible.

Then I had a White-point lurking in an eggbox's gloom, a Cypress Carpet, that fairly recent immigrant which is really flourishing in Britain, and a Treble-bar or possibly Lesser Treble-bar.

Next we have a couple of Red-line Quakers and a beautiful Swallowtail moth, a very recent emergence judging by the perfection of its wings and hairy thorax.

And away from the moths, Goodness what a lot of Daddy Long-legs are about. They are fantastically ungainly but determined to couple with one another whether at rest or aloft. This one hadn't learned, however, that trying to squeeze through an eggbox cone is a very bad idea.

To finish with, a socking great caddis fly, Micropterna sequax according to AI.  I am trying that out on iRecord.