I have no right to expect a wholly new moth at this time of the year but here we are: my first-ever Clancy's Rustic, a species which only made known landfall in the UK in 2002. Who spotted it? Mr Clancy, of course; a mighty name in the modern world of moths who had the knowledge to be sure that this was something different when it visited his light trap in Kent.
I had the same conviction this morning because although I am famously hopeless at sorting out the subtle differences between brown and grey moths and their often confusingly similar patterns, I was sure that I had not seen this before.
Here is Mr Clancy himself, a chap who has done a tremendous amount to spread interest in moths, including co-founding the excellent magazine Antropos which gave me the term 'Flight Arrivals' for regular records of incoming moths. I don't think that he will ever match Dr Kenneth Blair, the late head of entomology at the Natural History Museum, who has three moths named after him because he made their first known UK findings, being at the very busy Flight Arrivals spot of Freshwater on the Isle of Wight. But he certainly deserves the Rustic.
The moth has long been known to wider science, unsurprisingly, and was one of 193 moths (and 52) butterflies identified by the cheery-faced entomologist above, Christian Friedrich Freyer, who workd in Augsburg. In 1836, he gave it the sonorous name of Caradrina Kadenii, a name taken from the Balkan river Drin and an entomological colleague of Freyer's in Dresden, Karl Kaden. In German it's called Kaden's Owlet. I could go on and on, but I'm very happy to add this guest to my list.
It was a good night in other respects, nice and warm in this Indian Summer which we are enjoying, and with other arrivals including a Brick, above, which calls on me only seldom. Then we have a Box Tree moth, the notorious hedge scourge, peeping at you, a rich and lustrous Black Rustic which would grace a funeral cortège (maybe I should have badges of them made for mine), a Mother of Pearl micro, a Snout and a Rosy Rustic:
The eggboxes also provided shelter for a Yellow-tail (hiding the reason for its name, as almost always), a Red-green Carpet, a Mint Moth micro and a White-point, the last rather like the Brick but with white spots instead of grey-black.
Oh and an unusually restful hoverfly, Helophilus Pendulus, whose name - since I'm so heavily into nomenclature today, means 'Dangling Marsh-lover'.
Finally, as one of the Caesars no doubt remarked and as regular readers certainly know, I can never resist a Vestal. Here's a composite of a lovely one of these delicate annual immigrants from the continental mainland which stayed the night.
