All in vein

After my OAP muddles over nomenclature in the last post, the moths have kindly served me up with an easy one today. Behold the Blood-vein, above, snuggled up to an equally delightful Buff Ermine. There is no room for debate about the reason for its name.

It was the shortest night of the year - although I've never quite resolved whether that should be equal with the previous night, given that they 'bracket' the longest day. Help with this conundrum, as with everything else which floors me, would be gratefully received.  In spite of the limited flying hours, the moths were plentiful and I was specially taken with this Longhorn moth on the bulb collar. Imagine having eyebrows like that. The actual moth is the size of a pine nut.

No need to discuss the reason for its name either, nor that of the handsome Large Yellow Underwing which comes next, above, nor the Straw Dots, below - a sparkling young one and a rather tattier elder.

Finally, today's micro-moth. I think it's probably cheery old Celypha lacunana once again, with the pattern on this one resembling a smiley face. If you look at it upside down, it's more of a crosspatch, like one of those reversible people we used to draw in our exercise books during boring interludes in, for example, Latin lessons.

Drip, drop

Ah the pitter-patter of rain... I'm not complaining, as an apprentice vegetable-grower with a salad to provide for supper tonight, but it's tough on the moths. Mind you, their wing scales seem to have the sort of waterproofing which lanolin gives to sheep's fleeces and which other products also provide, often less effectively, for macs and gaberdenes.

This Scarlet Tiger, for instance, was perched amid raindrops on the moth-trap's plastic shield. He (or she) looked a little uncomfortable when I arrived, but responded obligingly to a tickle and showed a splash of that lovely scarlet underwing in the second picture. Think Folies Bergere... Then, after a bit too much provocation, he or she whirred away into the sky. You may well see these moths at the moment as they are frequent day-fliers, like the Cinnabar which also has splashes of bright red. Both look like frenzied helicopters of the Queen's Flight (the red bit), as opposed to the graceful soaring and gliding of butterflies.

My second moth this morning is the strangely-shaped Barred Straw, a moth which may also be disturbed by day - it would be the small, fluttery thing like a micro flying duster which skitters away when you brush through nettles. Its curious resting posture, shared by a number of other smaller moths, must surely have something to do with sexual attraction which is the be-all and end-all of life for most moths.

A Figure of Eighty also spent the night in the trap; its good condition shows the reason for its name nice and clearly, though why this particular species should have evolved into something which looks as though graffiti 'artists' have given it a daub, I do not know.

Finally, Penny the eagle-eyed spotter of moths in the house, exclaimed at this midget micro-moth which settled on a wall during supper last night. By experimenting with various torches, to overcome the chiarascuro effect from a nearby light, I have satisfied myself that it is a Light Brown Apple moth, or Epiphyas postvittana. Update: but Ben Sale provides welcome correction (yet again). It is the Carnation Tortrix, Cacoecimorpha pronubana.

But I am sometimes wrong because I am perpetually baffled by the way that the real-life micro-moths seldom exactly resemble Richard Lewington's excellent paintings. This is no slur on his work, just a comment on the remarkable variation of patterns and sometimes colours within a species.
So this could also be the Barred Fruit-tree Tortrix or Dark Fruit-tree Tortrix. Tortrix, btw, comes from the Latin for a shield, which this tribe resembles. Update: as my kind anonymous Commentor points out below (but in gentler terms) I was having a senior moment here. Where my notion came from, I do not know, but the name 'tortrix' actually comes from the Latin for 'twisting', or even 'torturing', which I think refers to the species' caterpillars' effect on fruit crop leaves. They are also known as 'leafrollers'.  As Wikipedia says:  "Notable tortricids include the codling moth and the spruce budworm, which are among the most well-studied insects on the planet because of their economic impact."  However, MW clearly hadn't studied them enough.

Lovely lady

A quick second post for today because, to my great satisfaction, I've just had a successful stalk of a Painted Lady. Don't misunderstand me - this wasn't a red light affair (although I am used to such confusions; when I hunted moths in Sulawesi, Indonesia, I soon learned not to ask people for the whereabouts of 'kupu-kupu malaam', the word for 'moths', because it also means 'ladies of the night.')

No, my Painted Lady was the butterfly of that name, a beautiful immigrant whose arrival in large numbers this summer has been widely forecast.  Her flight is unmistakable, grandly superior to the various 'browns' and the Small Tortoiseshell, in the manner of one of the fritillaries, those aristocrats of the UK butterfly world.

Her colouring also resembles their tawny livery, but with her own distinctive tones of salmon pink. This morning, they took me straight back to the first time I saw a Painted Lady, in the Valley Gardens at Harrogate when I was eight years old. Younger readers may be reassured: the excitement doesn't fade, all these years later.

Wearing of the green

I nearly missed my most interesting moth this morning because of the effectiveness of its camouflage. Was it a coincidence that the Light Emerald, above, chose the only green eggbox in the trap? I don't think so.  Not that all moths are so savvy when it comes to background. What explains the choice made by the Clouded Silver below?

The Light Emerald is unrelated to the ten other Emerald moths - they are nearly 30 pages apart in the Moth Bible - but it shares a feature of the colour green. This fades faster than any other colour in the spectrum on moths. It is commonplace to find a bleached emerald moth after only a few weeks of its life. Older specimens in collections need to be preserved so far as possible from any light or their colour is lost for ever.

Another delightful visitor last night was this Marbled Coronet, below, a moth which is almost impossible to see on lichen or bark, hence my choice of my pyjamas as the background. I tried to entice the moth on to some lichen on a wall, to prove my first point, but it spotted a crack in the mortar and wisely scuttled into it and out of reach. 

The next picture shows another newcomer for the year, a Heart and Club, and then we've a more familiar pair, a Peppered Moth in the background, behind a Spectacle, whose perky look I could not resist.

The immigrant Bordered Straw put in another appearance, below, and the regular Privet Hawk found a new resting position, gazing at the mercury vapour bulb in adoration from the neck of the trap's funnel.

Now for a little rogue's gallery of micros, which I will endeavour to ID. Left to right, top to bottom, I'm going for Barred Fruit-tree Tortrix (Pandens ceresana), Bud moth (Spilonota ocellana), Um, Er and finally Scoparia pyralella. Fingers crossed... Update: Trent kindly confirms these and fills in the missing one as Celypha lacunana (which I've often had and ought to recognise by now). Dave Wilton on Upper Thames Moths' blog, meanwhile, cautions that Scoparids are difficult to be sure of unless in fresh condition. As I say in my reply to Trent below, it's a tricky old business!

Lastly, I'm not sure what this is, below. A Square-spot Rustic with some scales missing? Update: Trent confirms SSR. Many thanks.

Carpeted

A charmingly sensitive email from a neighbour pinged into my Inbox the other day. This is what it said:

I have just been into the village hall and went upstairs to discover a mass of tiny moths over a lot of the wall! I think they are probably carpet moths. I wondered if you had any advice on either getting rid of them or dare I say it killing them. Is that a terrible thing to ask a man who loves moths.?!! I do apologise if it is.

Like Sherlock Holmes (or to be more accurate in terms of physique and intellectual capacity, Doctor Watson), I at once set out to investigate.

Each dot is a Tineola

The top three pictures are what I found: that small but deadly enemy of woollen carpets and high quality garments - think cashmere - the Common Clothes Moth. Known officially by the grander name of Tineola bisselliella - all micro moths have macro Linnean names - it is a menace. Chemical sprays are probably the best bet, though close-quarters Hoovering, using every available nozzle, is also effective. If damage to clothes is the problem, the answer is: don't store them, wear them. Clothes moths do not like being disturbed.

I am not sentimental about Clothes Moths, as you can see. I notice, though, that when I double-checked the little pests' identity on the Upper Thames Moths blog, the ultimate internet resource for baffled  mothpeople, the kind-hearted expert Dave Wilton, suggested that the carpets be changed to man-made fibre ones. I have passed all this on. I must also add that if anyone asked me which musical instrument I played, I would be tempted to reply: "The Tineola".

A bonus of walking up to the village hall was discovering that our three regular orchids are all in flower and there may possibly be a fourth. The ones I know about are the first three shown here: Bee, Pyramidal and Green-winged. But is the fourth picture something else?  If any passing orchidophile can put me right, I would be very grateful.

In the lovely sunshine, I also put up the Meadow Browns and Speckled Wood butterflies shown here, along with Large Whites, Brimstones and Small Tortoiseshells.  As W H Auden wrote of his schoolmastering days:  

Lucky this point time and space
Is chosen as my working place.

I give thanks daily.

May the Force be...Eeeek!

There was definitely a Star Warsy feel to the trap this morning, with this somewhat battered but still imposing male Puss Moth appearing to have infamous designs on a couple of interestingly different female Ghost moths.

The paler of the two, with the much less distinct pinky patterning, isn't illustrated in the Moth Bible and I've not had one here before. But colour and pattern variation is infamously common among moths.

I've been bewailing this problem with the minors over the last few posts - the fact that it is all but impossible to tell the various species apart without resorting to dissection (not for me, ugh). On size grounds, though - cos it was very small - I'll hazard a guess that this is a Rosy Minor. Update: Trent corrects me. It's a Middle-barred Minor, albeit somewhat rosy in hue.

The big fish in the trap, meanwhile, was my second Privet Hawk of the season. The last one came on the morning I had to scoot off to Leeds and although I had time to impress my granddaughter with it, I then liberated it in the gloomy depths of a shrub. This morning, I had a bit more time to mess around and so I repeated my gentle taunting of the Eyed Hawk with this, its much bigger cousin.

The results were the same. A quick, muscular flash of those warning colours. It would be a brave robin that tackled this.

Keeping an eye out

After a very slow start, when it seemed that the Poplar Hawk was the only one of UK moths' largest and most impressive tribe with plans to visit me this year, things have caught up rapidly. The Elephant, the Privet and now the lovely Eyed Hawk, with its famous device for frightening off predators with a quick flash of its hindwings, have all joined the 2015 guest list.



Here's a close-up, above, on the lines of a picture in a newspaper some years ago which made this part of the Eyed Hawk look like the head of a fox. That is fanciful and, as often mentioned here, we should be careful of assuming that similarities and/or camouflage which work for human eyes must also do the same for robins or mice. But the Moth Bible says that the flashing technique, usually accompanied by the moth rocking too and fro, "has been proved to deter insectivorous birds." Think back to Johnny Depp and that startling 'eye moment' in Pirates of the Caribbean, (above left) and you'll get the idea.

Meanwhile, it was good to see a smart little Flame Carpet, above, and yet another variant on the many shades of Minor moth, below, both beautifully set off by my pyjamas.

On the same lovely background, here is what I believe to be a micro from the Crambidae family, probably Eudonia mercurella though I wouldn't put money on it. Update: Nor would Dave Wilton, the arch-expert on the Upper Thames Moths blog, who reckons we need either a better specimen or the original to be absolutely sure. Which is reassuring about my ID bafflement with these little creatures, in a way.

Finally, that familiar visitor the Brimstone Moth, always welcome as a little source of light and brightness among the browns and greys. This one is unusual in that it actually entered the trap; more frequently, I find them a few feet away on the lawn or nearby foliage.