Not for the squeamish

Rain has stopped play for the time being but when I went out this morning to bring in the trap, I saw the sad sight above. It's the culmination of the slug and fly saga which I reported on two posts ago. As I suspected, the slug had somehow ambushed the fly or found it stuck on slime or dazzled by light and had sucked its innards dry.

Yuch!  And my next picture isn't much cosier. These are the remains of a moth or moths which I found jammed in an eggbox cone. It's quite interesting, though, in spite of the grim subject. That cable-like thing is the moth's proboscis, winding round something attached to one of its legs. Well, we can't say Tennyson didn't warn us, with his all-too-accurate line: 'Nature, red in tooth and claw...'

On a happier note, I distributed some of my Emperor Moth cocoons to the various enthusiasts who gathered around the Kirtlington Death's Head Hawk moth ten days ago, and here are a couple of photographs of them, above and below. Don't you think the one below looks a bit like a piece of carving by Grinling Gibbons? Martin Townsend, co-author of the Moth Bible and nurturer of three hatched Death's Heads from Kirtlington now, tells me his cocoon is a female. How he knows this, I have yet to find out.

Some more moths to conclude with:  a Willow Beauty, a Barred Fruit-tree Tortrix (Pandemis cerasana) I think, Pyrausta despicata from below and above Update: and one which is all my own work, which is highly unusual compared with being corrected by a kindly expert, but I think this is actually Hypsopygia costalis aka the Gold Triangle micro, a Shuttle-shape Dart and a very fine capucina form of the Green-brindled LabelsCrescent.

And finally finally, a curious picture which appealed to me for some reason. As you can see, I stopped in the course of my vaccing to take it. I felt that the Pink-barred Sallow and the vacuum cleaner had something in common. As for the Daddy Long-legs, I fear that I have Hoovered up quite a few of those.

Ford perfect

I have been re-reading the best books yet written on (a) butterflies and (b) moths, both by the same expert author, the late Professor Edmund Ford. I'd advise reading them in that order - Butterflies first then Moths - because Butterflies is easier going and also lays the groundwork for some complicated discussion of genetics in Moths which I still have to read several times to begin to understand.

Don't let that put you off, however. I once had lunch with the prof at the Travellers' Club in London and he was a wonderfully twinkly old bachelor about whom many stories are told. Some of these involved allegations of fairly extreme hostility to women outside their once traditional place in the nursery and kitchen (eg not at home in his much-loved Oxford University), but I suspect that quite a lot of teasing was involved. At all events, many of the people he thanks most warmly in his foreword to Moths are women.

He also has a very nice line in quips as you can see from the extracts above, on matricidal larvae, and below, on caterpillars which require sunshine to flourish (don't we all?)

I got Moths down from the shelves in one of my occasional attempts to find out what experts think about the way that light traps work - do they really 'attract', or is it a matter of the insects' delicate radar and antennae being dazzled and disrupted. Ford proposes a theory of two circles of light - if I understand him correctly - an outer one which does draw in the moths and then an inner one which disrupts them and sees them end up, effectively out of control, spiralling into the trap. This was published back in the 1960s mind, so I have plenty more researching to do (and trying to understand the research, with my feeble Grade 9 failure in physics-with-chemistry O Level, also in the 1960s).

On the subject of light, here's the scene in the garden yesterday afternoon. I can't pass a rainbow without trying to photograph it. The pot of gold was just behind our solitary but quite impressive pumpkin, though I haven't tried to dig it up yet - the pot, I mean. As for the pumpkin, roll on Hallowe'en.

Oh, and we'd better have a moth. I was intrigued by this battered Black Rustic and attempted a close-up of its wing stripped of scales - like a roof after a tornado, though in this case it was probably a bird that did the damage.

Pot pourri

A mixed bag today and I seem to have gone all French in my title - maybe under the influence of the lovely Merveille du Jour. A second one came today - pic below - which is great; it's good to know that they have a definite presence here rather than the lamp attracting a solitary, wandering pilgrim.

Unusually, because I usually release moths immediately, I've popped both of them in a shoebox together with a piece of oak bark - their favourite place for laying eggs - and some ivy flowers from which they sip nectar in the wild. I am now hoping that Darwinism does its stuff, though this depends on their being respectively male and female.

I was struck last night by the beauty of the trap as darkness fell and here are a couple of pictures I took - one with flash at the top of the post and one without below -  to see if you agree.

Meanwhile, I must announce the answer to my Grand Find the Second Error in the Bible competition. The winner from the millions of entrants was my good friend and adviser among commentors, Ray, who cryptically observed that the answer lay in the illustration. Indeed it does, as you can see here:

Still flitting about from subject to subject, I'm delighted to pass on news of two exceptional moths attracted by another two Commentors: the incomparable Ben Sale of Essex Moths, who has corrected my ID blunders with great patience and kindness for years, has landed that extremely rare honour of finding a new moth for the first time in the UK: an immigrant Fall Webworm (not a name I would like to have, but still. Read about it here. And Countryside Tales, as per her recent comments, has had a Clifden Nonpareil. Ooh I am jealous. Read about that here. But everything is said to come to he, or she, who waits.

Penultimately, here are some other residents of last night's eggboxes: a Satellite, a Burnished Brass, a Light Brown Apple micro (Epiphyas postvittana) and a Blair's Shoulder-knot extending a friendly paw, all above  - plus, below, a bizarre pair on the lamp flex: a slug apparently sucking the innards out of dead fly. Did the slug pounce when the fly was mesmerised by the lamp? I fear we will never know.

And finally, talking of predators, here is a Christmas card (minus snow) snap of my moths' worst enemy in the morning when I am taking pictures of them. I have no illusions about robins being dear little creatures. Still, you can't help but like them.

Marvellous indeed

I didn't think this season would have much more to offer me after last week's Death's Head Hawk moth excitements, but I was wrong.

Much as the skull-adorned monster awes me, my favourite moth has always been the Merveille du Jour which I never saw in Leeds but hosted for a single night a year ago.

Here he (or she) is back again, after a night so chilly that I almost had second thoughts about putting out the trap.  After examining half-a-dozen eggboxes, I thought I was going to have to be content with a trio of (very nice) Green-brindled Crescents - one below, followed by a close-ish-up of its metallic scales - and a smattering of brown and chestnutty things.

Then I saw a scrap of very different green beside a cone underneath the next eggbox and - yippee, your heart really does leap, or at least mine does - there was a Merveille du Jour. A Marvel of the Day indeed, even if it is strictly a Wonder of the Night.

You might be interested in my cack-handed photography efforts, btw, as illustrated above. I have lost my faithful little tripod Miranda and my quavering hands have meant a bit of a decline recently in whatever sharpness in pictures I previously managed to achieve. I did the Merveille twice, once at about 8.30am without the bigger tripod and then again at 10.30am. It's interesting to see how the camera 'lies' about the colour. The reality is a mostly mixture of the two although the actual colour of the moth does change depending on the light because of the nature of the cells. Mind you, my camera now lets out a little spiral of smoke after taking a flash photo, rather like those revolving, exploding ones on Kodak Instamatics, so I think its days may be numbered.

Colour at 8.30am...

...and two hours later

For scale, here's the moth again, below, with a Barred Sallow and one of the Green-brindled Crescents and I'll leave you with another Barred Sallow on Penny's red kneeler, in case by now you are a bit fed up with the colour green. Update: Sorry, that one's a Pink-barred Sallow - many thanks for the correction to Julian, a fellow enthusiast and light-trap operator just up the road whom I met at the Great Hawk Moth Fest.

Brain gym

I was hoping to round off my Death's Head Hawk moth ecstasy by winning a bundle on the 3.50pm at Brighton where the field included a racehorse called Hawk Moth which was tipped on Radio 4's Today programme. Alas it proved to be a non-runner on the day, a shame because our household has a resident betting expert in Penny.

Her form dates back to when she was small girl with flu and got to reading the racing pages in the paper when confined to bed. After a few days she reckoned she'd spotted a surefire winner and begged her Mum to put a few pounds on it. The request was denied, properly because gambling is a terrible thing to get into; but also sadly, because the horse romped home.

The moth trap has been low-key too with cold nights and rather a lot of rain. Still, I'm hoping to put it out tonight as things have got noticeably warmer and, fingers crossed, it will stay dry. All I can offer you for now is this Shuttle-shape Dart which was resting with its wings in a more relaxed posture than the usual 'Stand at Attention' position.

In the meanwhile, it's been a long time since the blog had a competition, so here's one to crack your brains. When Martin Townsend showed me the under-printing of the words 'Common Swift' beneath Richard Lewington's lovely picture of a Death's Head Hawk in the Moth Bible of which they are co-authors, he added: "There's another mistake in the first edition too, and amazingly it's on the cover."

Here's the cover, below.  Can you see the error?  I have looked at it thousands of times since Penny gave me this invaluable book in 2005 with the accurate inscription: "If it isn't in here, it doesn't exist." But I had never spotted the glitch.

Unholy Grail part 2 - the movie...

I'm not trying to compete with Silence of the Lambs, let me assure you, but here - I hope - is my little film of the Death's Head Hawk moth described at great length and with many a gush in the preceding post.

The handler is Martin Townsend, co-author of the Moth Bible, and the discussion is about the moth's vigorous pooing as it got under way. I'm sorry about the mysterious cicada-like sounds from something electronic but you can hear the moth's actual squeak at 26 seconds in.  More on my previous post. Now: Lights...Ice-creams or popcorn...Action...

Unholy Grail

Every enthusiast has their Holy Grail and I have at last encountered mine: a meeting with a real, live Death's Head Hawk moth.

From the appearance of the insect, the largest moth you can find in the UK, and its sinister reputation in folklore, literature and art, you might prefer the designation used in my title. But I have always hoped to find one of these remarkable creatures, ever since I was a schoolboy in shorts and an Aertex shirt with a net and 'killing bottle'. (Our local chemist in Leeds supplied me with a potent little bottle of 'killing fluid' without any questions asked).

The circumstances of our momentous get-together yesterday made the occasion even richer. The co-author of the incomparable Moth Bible, whose virtues I have sung here many, many times, is Martin Townsend who lives in Oxford and is one of the many experts on that other rod and staff for the moth ID-challeged, the Upper Thames Moths blog. He very kindly emailed me yesterday to say that he was taking a freshly-hatched Death's Head Hawk back to a village near us to show to the finders of its caterpillar. Would I like to come?

Would I!! Penny and I duly turned up at the home of a very hospitable couple who laid on tea and flapjacks as well as the moth - and revealed the extraordinary fact that they had found not just the one caterpillar back in August, but FOUR. If I found a Death's Head Hawk caterpillar, I wouldn't let it out of my sight (once I had recovered from swooning), but with remarkable coolness this chap went indoors to 'phone the local wildlife expert and ask him round, then returned to his lawn across which the huge (for a caterpillar) beast had been trudging.

Bright yellow and green, it was some eight feet further on its journey which ended when he placed a rhubarb forcing pot over it, both to confine it and keep it safe from predatory birds. These would have been brave, given the lurid warning colours and the caterpillar's habit of trying to bite attackers - an extremely rare thing in UK species - but the threat was real.

The original caterpillar and the grub-like state of the second one, pre-successful pupation

Fascinatingly, on later inspection by which time the moth telegraph had brought Martin T on to the scene, the caterpillar started digging down into the soil - not to escape like an RAF prisoner in Stalag Luft III, but to pupate. This it did successfully and Martin took it into expert custody pending hatching later in the year..

Meanwhile, advised by the local wildlife man and Martin, the caterpillar finder and his niece and nephew then carefully dug his potato patch and found two further Death's Head pupae and one caterpillar in the process of metamorphising, which is complex in this species. As the photos taken at the time show, the caterpillar turns first into a vulnerable grub-like thing before encasing itself in a hard protective shell. Exposure at this stage can be fatal and sadly that proved the case; but one of the other pupae was the one which hatched into yesterday's grand moth.

The pupa of the original caterpillar which hatched into yesterday moth and (right) the 'grub-stage'  which didn't make it

Devout readers may remember that last year I reported another local enthusiast's experience of having a Death's Head Hawk fly into his home in Witney late at night, not stopping long enough to be photographed but evidence that Oxfordshire is a county on their wishlist. Maybe we'll be next. When it stops raining, I will go out and very carefully comb our potato patch.

The moth on the Bible-writer's hand

A final point: the appearance of the moth surprised me. After years of seeing pictures of 'set' specimens with their wings artificially pegged out, I had always thought of its blue and yellow body and yellow underwings as the thing that would strike me, should I ever come across one in the wild. Far from it. At rest, the moth is as dark and Darth Vaderish as its reputation suggests. And when it revealed its hidden parts by scrambling about yesterday, the black and yellow bands - the same combination as used in nuclear and other hazard warning signs - reminded me of nothing so much as a vast hornet.

 

I made a film of this which I'll try to run in a separate post. It's not terribly good and you have to listen very closely to hear the moth's alarmed squeaking - another unique ability in UK terms, made by a reed like a saxophone's at the base of the short, thick proboscis. As always happens when I film, some hidden electrical gadget (or it maybe the camera) produces a regular and louder squeak of its own.

One little postscript to this saga. I took along my Bible for Martin to sign which he kindly did, and he also pointed out one of those tiny errors which make books extra-interesting. Removed from the second edition, it's slap in the middle of Richard Lewington's characteristically brilliant illustration of the Death's Head Hawk. I've looked at this picture plate (left) many, many times without noticing it. Can you see it, below?