Marvel of my day

"Lord, now lettest Thou thy servant depart in peace," sang Eli and, without I hope being blasphemous, I have a milder version of the same sense of deep satisfaction.

For Lo! the moth I have been hoping for more than anything except one of the Clifden Nonpareils which have made a startlingly large number of appearances in these parts this autumn, flew in last night.

It is the ravishing, and ravishingly-named Merveille du Jour, one of the most inspired of the many lovely coinings of the literary and artistic coterie - including the famous clown Joey Grimaldi and many talented 18th century painters - who named our butterflies and moths. I'm glad they did, because the mighty Linnaeus gave the moth the unmemorable and possibly misleading name of Griposia aprilina.

I think that I can leave the pictures to tell the story other than to say that it was a near miss. The moth was outside the trap and you may be able to see from dimpled grass in the second photograph below how nearly I came to treading on it. Luckily, I have learned to give the lamp's surroundings a good inspection before turning to the eggboxes themselves.

Hope you can see the moth, a bit left of centre

I shall now go an have my shower, during which I will sing one of my favourite hymns, Penny being a hundred miles away on her Women's Walking Weekend. Here are the words:

Hushed was the evening hymn,

The temple courts were dark;

The lamp was burning dim

Before the sacred ark;

When suddenly a voice divine

Rang through the silence of the shrine.

The old man, meek and mild,

The priest of Israel, slept;

His watch the temple child,

The little Levite, kept;

And what from Eli’s sense was sealed

The Lord to Hannah’s son revealed.

O give me Samuel’s ear,

The open ear, O Lord,

Alive and quick to hear

Each whisper of Thy Word,

Like him to answer at Thy call,

And to obey Thee first of all.

O give me Samuel’s heart,

A lowly heart, that waits

Where in Thy house Thou art,

Or watches at Thy gates;

By day and night, a heart that still

Moves at the breathing of Thy will.

O give me Samuel’s mind,

A sweet unmurm’ring faith,

Obedient and resigned

To Thee in life and death,

That I may read with child like eyes

Truths that are hidden from the wise.

He's gone all holy this morning

There's a plinky-plonky version of the tune here if you'd like to rock along. Good last lines, eh? Another more secular moral to this morning's events may be the old proverb: 'Everything comes to him who waits." But I worry about this as a possible invitation to lethargy and prefer Cromwell's typically robust: "We must not wait for the iron to heat but must make it hot by striking."

Much to mull on. The rest of the catch tomorrow after P's joyous return.

A pretty clutch

Penny's away on the annual Women's Walking Weekend with family - strictly female family - in the Lakes, so I am getting up earlier and enjoying more moth time (much as I miss her, needless to say).

This was handy this morning as a nice little procession of moths emerged from the eggboxes including the Red-green Carpet with its perky little tail in my top picture. Here it is below, from a more conventional viewpoint.

It was also nice to get the year's first capucina form of the Green-brindled Crescent, named like the coffee after the brown and cream robes of Capucin monks and effectively a Brown-brindled C. Keeping it company, in terms of colourway, was a handsome Deep Brown Dart, usually much less frequent than October's ubiquitous Black Rustics but giving them a run for their money in my trap this year.

Next we have a Satellite, lovely moth, with its delicate imprint of a Space Invaders alien craft on each wing.  And then my first Red-line Quaker of 2015 - it just shows how much is still around even on these chilly nights.

Finally an immigrant Dark Swordgrass with its dark sword neatly showing on its sheathed forewing. One of the beige forms of the Lunar Underwing is keeping it company.

A green thought. Or two.

I was singing the praises of the Green-brindled Crescent the other day. As a result, maybe, it has been turning up regularly in the trap.  Last night it brought a smaller mate with it: a Brindled Green. Here they are together; different sizes but the same beautifully subtle mixture of colours and patterns.

When I Instagrammed these moths, a friend was struck by their similarity to lichen. This is indeed the case; another example of superb camouflage brought about by natural selection and the survival of the lichenist.

The G-bC on my equally lovely green sweater

When we lived in Leeds, Penny had a friend who was a major lichen boffin at the university. His antennae were alerted by lichen wherever he went including, on one occasion, a very interesting example on the wall of a cottage in the Dales. "May I help you?" asked its woman owner frostily but understandably given that she'd just found a middle-aged man scraping bits off her property.

The Brindled Green on an eggbox

"I told her that I was from the Government, checking local walls, and if she didn't hear any more that would mean that everything was in order," he told Penny. "I don't know why I said it. It just came into my head." It also worked, as the woman was satisfied and went back indoors.

A Black Rustic, one of many in the trap at the moment along with the somewhat similar but less dramatic Deep Brown Darts

Autumn colours

 

The nights are longer and the mornings darker, but keeping the moth lamp burning into the autumn brings a rich reward. This morning, for example, saw these three interesting and beautiful overnight visitors. A welcome start to the day.

The Green-brindled Crescent, subject of my first two pictures, is a straightforwardly lovely moth with a marvellous mixture of greens, greys, browns and pinks which any dress designer would envy. It comes in two main forms, one greenish the other browny, but has all manner of subtle variations in between.

My second arrival, above, is a familiar friend, Blair's Shoulder-knot, but I have learned more about it while checking my finds with that excellent web page Hants Moths Flying Tonight. Because this referred to the insect as Blair's Shoulder-knot or Stone Pinion, I did a little more Googling to discover the origins of this alternative which was new to me.  

I have often referred in the past to the eminent Dr Blair, a retired entomologist from the Natural History Museum in London who lived on the Isle of Wight and discovered no fewer than three species new to England there which all now carry his name. Blair's Shoulder-knot, Blair's Wainscot and Blair's Mocha all made landfall in the UK on the island after setting out from continental Europe on probes north. What I didn't know was that Dr Blair modestly described the Shoulder-knot as 'Stone Pinion' in his original report of the find in 1951.

Although it acknowledged the moth's similarities with the Pale and Tawny Pinion - the first an occasional visitor here too - the name didn't catch on and others insisted that the moth should acknowledge Blair. It has since spread rapidly, almost certainly because of the huge - and in all other respects depressing - surge in popularity for its foodplant, cypress. If only the caterpillars could dispose of all those Leyland cypress hedges.

Finally, here's that delightful Autumn regular, the Frosted Orange. As the newsletter of South Wales Butterfly Conservation (one of my Googling finds) says: 'Those observers who keep trapping well into Autumn are often rewarded not only with the chance to see Blair's Shoulder-knot, but also some of the most beautifully-marked species found in Great Britain.'  The writer adds sagely that many Autumn moths are considered rarer than they probably are, simply because so many people have called it a day for the year's trapping.

In the pink

Eclipsed

Supermoon

The moon famously went pink last night, and so did my moths. I wanted to see the eclipse of the 'supermoon' and managed to wake myself up at 1.30am, 2.15am, 2.45am and finally 3.30am when the eclipse was under way. Sleepiness and the limitations of my iPad mean that my photographic record of the great event is rudimentary. But there was a nice coincidence in the moth trap this morning.

Three Pink-barred Sallows had arrived, my first of this year. They couldn't have chosen a more propitious night. I've now had the Sallow, the Centre-barred Sallow and the Barred Sallow. The Orange Sallow, the Dusky-lemon Sallow and the Pale-yellow Sallow have yet to make it. The last is very rare, so I'm not expecting it. But you never know.

Also there among the Lunar Underwings et al was this nice Snout moth. It always puts me in mind of Pinocchio, and I do not tell a lie.

Allsorts

The nights have got colder and the moth trap's contents have settled into routine mode, with the likes of the Black Rustic and Lunar Underwing coming in good numbers, along with a dozen other familiar species. So it's been down to Penny the World's Leading Outside-the-Trap Spotter, to come up with the goods this time.

She spotted the little chap in the top two pictures on our flour jar - or should that be flour pot, as opposed to flowerpot)? At first, because of the heart shape, I thought it was what I call the Valentine moth, Acleris forsskaleana, which can have a second brood around now. But a closer look at the patterning and the wing shape convinces me that it is one of the lively family of Carnation Tortrixes,  Cacoecimorpha pronubana, who live in our greenhouse.

By chance, a rather similarly coloured micromoth spent the night in the trap. I think that it is a Light Brown Apple moth, Epiphyas postvittana, which is a stalwart here and no doubt enjoys our apple trees.  Back to Penny, and she did well to spot this Large Ranunculus, below, sleeping just under our porchlight, along with two Lunar Underwings, one grey and the other brown but both very well camouflaged.

I was a bit of a Penny myself when I went to inspect the moth trap. I usually check out its surroundings though my thoroughness depends on how sleepy I am feeling plus the competing call of early morning tea. On this occasion I was quite alert and spotted these three Black Rustics on the wall and grass.

While checking the eggboxes, I had time to take this photograph of a flimsy little carpetty moth, but it fluttered away before I could take a more illuminating shot. Dave Maunder on the endlessly excellent Upper Thames Moths blog has come to my rescue by ID-ing it as a Common Marbled Carpet.

Tale of a tail

Moths are generally very samey when it comes to resting positions. When Penny and I came in last night, she (the unparalleled moth-spotter where insects outside the trap are concerned) noticed three of them sleeping happily in light drizzle below our porch light. All formed neat little triangles with their bodies and underwings well hidden even though they were otherwise very different-looking species: two Lunar Underwings and a Large Ranunculus.

Today's moth is different. One of the many Square-spot Rustics around at this time of year, it had pegged out rather thoroughly on the base of the moth trap's bowl. Update: I think today's commentor is right to re-identify this as a Small Square-spot. Many thanks. In the process it revealed its thickly tufted tail. When photographing moths, you get used to seeing a mop of hair or fur on the heads of recently-hatched specimens, which have yet to undergo the rigours of life including hair loss. But many are well endowed at the other end too. It is just that this feature is seldom seen.

If it was, this creature might be nicknamed 'Tufty', just as William Morris was known to his friends as 'Topsy' because of the impressive thatch on top of his large and imagination-packed head. I learned this satisfying fact only yesterday on a hugely enjoyable first visit to Kelmscott Manor which I can't recommend too much. You are never too old to discover new things.  Here is a cartoon of Topsy fishing in the Thames which runs alongside the Manor's grounds; like the Disciples, he is drawn by Dante Gabriel Rossetti innocently casting his bait on the wrong side of the boat.

Another visitor more observant than me kindly pointed out the (deliberate) butterfly reflection of the stair lamp. And among May Morris's treasures in a cabinet upstairs, there was a lovely foreign hawkmoth preserved, a variant I think of the Striped Hawk.

Same difference

Willow and Sallow abound round here, with both a river and a canal within an easy walk from the garden. Not surprising, then, that we are visited regularly and in large numbers at the moment by the Sallow moth. What may surprise some readers, however, is the variability of the Sallow. My first three pictures are all of this species, in descending order of strength of colour in the creme caramel pattern.

The last of the three is the most washed-out although you can see the same basic structure of the different colours.  To add to the confusion (at least in the heads of poor moth-identifyers such as myself), there is a relative called the Pink-barred Sallow which is alarmingly similar. I don't think that either of the top two in my series of pictures is one of those, but I have been wrong before...

Another moth which is very common in the trap at the moment shares this range of colouring within a single species: the Lunar Underwing. The next four pictures are all of Lunar Underwings. I wonder if they find humans disconcertingly different in appearance.

Good to see a handsome Silver Y perching proudly on the bowl top, meanwhile, with a very washed out Green Carpet on the canopy. 

Finally, I think our micro moth representative today is a Bee moth, aka Aphomia sociella, Its name derives from its habit of nesting in old bumblebees' nests, where its caterpillars can be found feeding off the remains of dead former inhabitants. Update: I think that both Trent and the commentor on the next post are right to say that my 'Bee moth' is actually an immigrant species, the Rush Veneer. Many thanks to both.