Busy times at my granddaughter's lamp

 

We were back on grandchildren duty this week and so had a chance to enjoy our granddaughter's enthusiasm for her actinic moth trap. This is smaller than my mercury vapour lamp and much less bright to the human eye, both advantages where they live. It is also handily portable when visiting friends and family who don't mind moths being examined over breakfast.

The weather was extremely unpredictable but luckily they have a stout outdoors table which provides a complete umbrella on top of the very effective rain-shield fitted to the trap. It didn't protect the whole area of the patio nearby, however, and the first moth that we saw in the morning was a little Brimstone, apparently drowned in a planter which had filled with rain.

As is so often the case, a bit of gentle prodding showed that the moth was actually very much alive which luckily ended the granddaughter's brief moment of "I'm never going to use the trap again if it drowns moths", commendable in terms of human kindness but a shame if it brought her journey of entomological discovery to an early end. Although up to now her chief pleasure from moths has been having them on her fingers, followed by breeding caterpillars, she now shows tremendous concern for putting them safely back in the wild. She may be just the weapon I need against my robin.

The Brimstone is pictured above, drying out in the care of a Lego man, followed by the actual residents of the trap - a fine Bright-line Brown-eye, a handsome male Muslin with its yellow breeches and complex antennae and a couple of Clouded Drabs. 

More was however to come.

After the children had gone to school, I had a brief moment to conduct a more careful search of the area round the trap, always a worthwhile thing to do. Bingo! On one table-leg was a very pretty Seraphim while a Pebble Prominent, the best moth of the whole haul, had gone to sleep on the pointing of the nearest bit of house wall.

The latter was still there when the granddaughter got home at 3.30pm and here it is on her hand. 

Back home last night, I lit the trap late at 10pm and things got very wet later on. There were half-a-dozen Hebrew Characters and Muslins but this second Seraphim's sadly tattered condition rather sums the current state of moth-trapping here up. 

The other Brimstone, the lovely, lemony butterfly with its scalloped wings and powerful flight, was very much about in the grandchildren's garden during the sunny day which followed the night's rain. I took these photos of the same insect on Honesty from different sides. A Holly Blue and a Peacock were also flitting around but were too restless for me to get a picture.

Lots going on, all of a sudden

 One of my lively and delightful tribe of great-nieces (and a nephew) has been in hospital, poor mite, but on the cheery side she's taken a great interest in the arts, crafts and play ideas which they have on the ward and in the garden. She's only four but already a great observer of nature including moths, and she's just done this brilliant exercise in the fascinating subject of their camouflage.

I've quite frequently discussed this here, with examples such as the Buff-tip so resembling a twig and the glorious Merveille du Jour almost invisible on lichen. Here are some of the little one's rather bolder efforts. Don't they make the point well! 

Her work must have triggered my own moth antenna and led to that excellent happening, the discovery of a moth here which has never visited before. After disturbing my first Green Carpet of the year while walking along the canal towpath, I noticed a tiny flutter out of the corner of my eye when I was riddling and sprinkling compost in our veg garden.

It was so fragile and low-powered that I thought at first that it was a fragment of leaf disturbed by my shovelling, but once it landed on the soil, it had a definite, triangular moth shape.

Because of its size, the acute, isosoles type of triangle and the longish palps or mouth-parts, I made a second assumption; that it must be a micro-moth. But after consulting both the Micro Bible and the main Moth Bible, I am pretty sure that it is a Buttoned Snout. I often get the ordinary Snout Mouth here, the Pinocchio moth with its very long 'nose' - actually the palps; but its various, smaller relatives are much less common. The Buttoned Snout for example was until recently categorised as 'Nationally Scarce, List B', the third-highest protection level for a species.  

That has recently changed thanks to better record-keeping to 'Locally Common' in parts of the South and East of England, including low-lying areas near to the River Thames, which include us. But it's new for my records and very welcome, as are the next two moths.

They are the first hawk moths to visit me in 2024, just a day later than the record debut which was on 26 April during the sunny 'Pandemic Spring'. They are Poplar Hawks, always the first of my seven regular hawk species to arrive. Interestingly, because these are Spring hatching moths unlike the Buttoned Snout which hibernates after emerging in late Summer or Autumn, one of them is already very worn and torn. Life isn't easy for moths.

It was chilly yet again last night and there was little else in the trap's eggboxes but this second fresh Green Carpet was asleep on the side of the bowl. 

And finally in the moth world, my younger son dug up the pupa below while gardening and is keeping it to see what emerges.  It's always worth digging carefully in the late Spring and Summer to avoid crushing one of these unexpected buried treasures.

One of my other Summer pleasures has just started after weeks of Red and even Black Flag conditions on the swollen Thames. I'm out again in Clementine, the doughty touring sculling boat which took me from Oxford to London six years ago on a money-raising sponsored row. Friends in the last three days include this cormorant with its terrific wings-extended stance (drying out the feathers which are not oily like ducks') and lively families of ducklings and goslings.  What an excellent time of the year it is, if only it would warm up.

Slenderly Magnificent

Today's top moth is a really exciting find - not by myself but by a good buddy whose excitement I most happily share at second-hand. He is one of a number of people who kindly ask me from time to time about the identity of their garden discoveries, a rash thing to do as readers familiar with my many blunders will know.

This time, there was no doubt at all that he had found something extremely excellent, even though his consultations in books and online had led him to the tentative conclusion that it was a Burnished Brass. That's a lovely moth (or possibly moths as the scientific community is still debating whether its differing wing patterns justify dividing the species), but it is widespread. As Rupert said in his message: 

"Predictably, it turns out to be something as common as muck in suburban gardens and not, as I was beginning to hope, some special rarity, previously unknown to science."

Not so fast!

He was on to the right family and the BB and his find do share the wonderful metallic sheen caused by reflective and refractive mirror wingscales. But there's nothing ordinary about this moth. 

It is a Slender Burnished Brass, a North African species recorded fewer than 100 times in the UK and only five times on the Isle of Wight where my friend lives. He's the cartoonist Rupert Besley whose work you may know, especially in holiday postcards and book illustration.  Here's an example as a tribute to his discovery:

And here's the griff on the Besley Moth from the Moth Bible which the island's moth recorder Jim Baldwin updated before happily registering Rupert's find. As Jim says, the moth is doubly unusual as most Slender BB records have been between July and October. His theory is that this one came over in food imported from North Africa by supermarkets or wholesalers - that's how it earns the title of 'adventist' being a species which takes advantage of such hitch-hiking.

and here are some of my own recent arrivals at the trap, mundane by comparison with the Slender Burnished Brass and its glorious scimitar of yellowy-green but still handsome enough: an Oak Beauty,  an alert male Muslin Moth and a Lunar Marbled Brown with particularly distinctive crescent moons. 

Numbers in the light trap have not been large because of cold nights, including even a short spell of frost, but the days remain sunny by and large and more butterflies are about. I saw but failed to photograph a Holly Blue on a bike ride last week and took a quick pic of a Small White - deadly enemy of our brassicas later in the year when I'm ashamed to say that I show them no mercy. Speckled Woods are also about in areas of dappled shade - the two photos below are of the same one, with the different light concealing and then showing the downy surface of the wings as they get closer to the body.

Apart from the cold, my moths also face an implacable and ruthless hunter in this Robin below, the cleverest in a long line of cunning monitors of my morning visits to inspect the contents of the eggboxes.  I'm glad to say that I kept him away from the Waved Umber, Clouded Drab, Powdered Quaker and three pugs, an Oak Tree and two Dotted. 

Other insect visitors in the last week have included this bright Red Mite among a very small sample of the countless seeds produced by a Paulownia tree in the grandchildren's garden, a plump Hornet which I nearly squashed while repairing the treehouse roof (fortunately they are very docile in spite of their fearsome size and colouring) and these Ladybirds enjoying the sun on a fruit cage in the beautiful gardens at Rousham, five miles up the road from here. Aphid beware! Hungry Ladybirds are currently emerging all over the place from their Winter sleep.

The year's first Empress

 The first of the big annual highlights took place here on Thursday night, the arrival of a female Emperor moth in the trap were she obligingly laid some eggs. Breeding Emperors and Empresses has been a regular feature of life here among the moths - three successive generations raised in past years, one of them shown in the blog's title section - but I don't have time for that at the moment. They will have to take their chance in our hawthorn hedge.

I left the Empress discreetly in the shed to see if any males would be attracted by her pheromones, a process known as 'assembling' which can draw suitors from up to a mile away. None came and I moved her to a budding hibiscus but she spent the afternoon undisturbed before clearing off.

An other favourite came the same night, spurning the eggboxes and instead taking up position on the lightbulb-holder. It's a Chocolate-tip, happily-times to cheer up a little great-niece who is recovering in hospital from a nasty infection.

Another new-for-this-year was the easily-missable thumbnail of a moth, the Least Dark Arches immediately below, followed by one of my great favourites, a Muslin moth.  I've included quite a few pictures of this deceptively modest, soft grey moth to show the riches which lie beneath its lightly-dotted cloak.

A second one came last night and two American friends who are staying with us took these excellent photos making further revelations of the patterns and colours which the Muslin usually hides. Please note my lovely finger.