Graveyard shift

A splash of colour in the trap this morning turned out to be this Sexton Beetle, known as 'Nature's undertakers' because of the efficient way they dispose of animal corpses. Any they find, they bury, and then use as a combination of food store and nest for their young. This one (which is playing dead after I tipped it from its eggbox) may have been on the lookout for yellow underwings, of which there were stacks among the other boxes, all very much alive. Also there was this formidably sized wasp which I have yet to identify (And now Dean has kindly done it for me. It's a Hornet, ugh. See Comments). It was comatose, or possibly dead (Sexton Beetles please note) so I placed it next to an ordinary wasp which was slumbering nearby. We are getting into wasp season, which annoys us mainly on account of their habit of licking our garden chairs with their sharp tongues to carry off tiny bits of wood for their pulp nests. The latter are wonderful creations, but I wish they could source their building material elsewhere.

Also around this morning were plenty of Riband Waves, prominent members of the Laura Ashley school of moth design. Here are the two best-known variations: the plain Idaea remutata which is commoner here in the North, and the banded aversata which is paying us a visit from its headquarters down South. Talking of which, I must go now, to help get things ready for a couple of guests from London. The sun is shining to welcome them, while I believe it's raining down there.



Latin names are a bit of a struggle, even for someone such as myself who studied and enjoyed the subject at school. So far as I can work out, the Idaea here is a reference to Mount Ida in Crete (and mythology; Zeus was brought up there), aversata means 'turned away' and remutata is related to changing things for the second time. What it all has to do with these small, pale and delicate moths is a mystery.

It's been so long...

Back to the trap at last, after almost a month away. It was July 17th when I last turned the light on, before assorted birthday celebrations, bliss on Paxos and the inevitable penalty in terms of a backlog at work. Conditions aren't exactly propitious at the moment, with August proving its usual treacherous self, but there was a massive army of assorted yellow underwings encamped among the eggboxes. The mere sight of them makes me weary, and if one or two were captured by birds in spite of my careful hiding of their comatose selves, I am not honestly too bothered. We have Sparrowhawks mewing at the moment, and a lovely, fluttering family of Long-tailed tits, and I would rather have them than approximately 250 yellow underwings any time.

Also slumbering, though, were Spectacle moths with their strange little pairs of glasses on (or so it looks, because of their head patterning,) plus the distinctive eyebrow marks on their wings. There were lots of Silver and Golden Ys, abundant small moths whose identification must wait another day, and these two: a Willow Beauty (I think), above right, wondering if the hen has laid, while a wasp checks out the salt content of the eggs. And a Dark Arches, left, a handsomely patterned moth. Admittedly, it's all a little subdued after the butterfly glories of Paxos and Leeds' sunny spell last week. But we can't live in technicolour all the time.

Now you know them, now you don't

A rare feat of identification today, plus a complete failure. I have no idea what my very, very last Paxiot find is (above), although I'd guess that it is some sort of locust. Briefly, as it bulleted past us on a donkey track near the deserted village of Kambos Korah, I hoped it might be another hawk moth to go with the Hummingbird ones. But no. It certainly explains the old description of that Austin Healey sports car as the 'bug-eyed Sprite.'

Better results, though, from this Sherlock Holmes-style wafer of paper sent to me by our in-laws, Suri and Radha, who are notable natural history investigators. Suri spent ages stalking a monitor lizard and getting an excellent dragon-style photo of it when we were in Sri Lanka in February, and last time we went to see them near Solihull we had a long, fabulous visit from a Green Woodpecker in their garden. Anyway, Suri found this moth dead and lovingly sent it to me in the paper. Alas, it couldn't withstand the buffetings of the Royal Mail, but using all my forensic expertise, I am fairly sure that it is (was) a Heart and Dart. I append a close-up of the wing which clinched this conclusion. Way back at the beginning of this blog, I wrote about the Heart and Dart (a very common moth here) and even made it the subject of one of the blog's very rare competitions. I got a Comment from a soap shop in New York, also called Heart and Dart, which chuffed me greatly. Ain't the internet a wonderful thing..? as old John Junor of the Sunday Express would have said.

Creeping things

The news at ten wasn't particularly interesting last night, but it lured out Grandson of Bob (above) from his nook somewhere in our living room. He is the third generation of a family of large but harmless spiders - about as wide as a digestive biscuit toe-to-toe - which share our house, appearing infrequently but usually during the TV news. He reminded me to conclude the Paxos chapter of this blog with a few final creatures which are neither butterflies nor moths.

Our guidebook told us cheerfully that the island had little venemous life to worry about, but a good line in fierce-looking specialists in insect mimicry. I'm assuming that these three are examples: a large black bee which visited many times every day, ignoring us but feeding rapaciously at pretty much every flower in the garden; a hornety thing which takes the expression 'wasp-waisted' to extremes; and a hairy, spidery-looking fly which lived in a cleaning bucket. Finally, we found this snake which had met a car or scooter some time previously. This was a shame but meant that we could examine it and take the picture safely.
Acually, I have got two more Greek bugs to show, both locusty, so I'll deal with them tomorrow, along with an identification triumph (I think) involving a moth sent in the post. Then, if the weather is kind, we'll be back to the moths of Leeds at the weekend. Meanwhile check out Ezekiel 38:20 for the origins of this post's heading.

The colour of china

Famously, if you dig anywhere in an English garden, you find scraps of blue and white china. If you butterfly-watch in Paxos, you soon see the flutter of blue and white wings. Two species which are highly elusive in the UK were common there: the delicate little Wood White (right,) which weaves about in the olive groves, and the Long-tailed Blue (left), which was constantly on the go above a mixture of vines and wisteria which spilled over the balcony of our villa. It also enjoyed a pea-like flower, as in the picture, whose veins slightly resemble the Blue's underwing pattern. I found it impossible to get a full picture of the blue topwings, which flash in the sun as it whizzes by. As soon as it settles, its wings fold and all you can see is the - admittedly pretty - underwing. The same applies to the Wood White, but because it flies much more slowly, I managed to get one in flight with all four wings spread out (below). Since they are all monochromatically white, it isn't terribly interesting. The picture of the blue does at least have just a glimpse of the much more glorious colours within. One day...

Just to top and tail my Paxiot adventures, I'm logging three final butterflies seen there, below: the local versions of the Small Copper, Wall and Meadow Brown. Meanwhile, to keep the Leeds end up, we were visited yesterday by our first Red Admiral of 2010's new season (as previously recorded, we saw a gallant old one on a walk in the Spring.) I didn't get a picture of yesterday's, but managed a couple of a Speckled Wood and a very small Gatekeeper, or Hedge Brown. I initially thought that it was a Small Copper, and it's made even smaller by wing damage. (Note that, too, on the Paxiot Wall, below left. It doesn't seem to affect flight until things get really tatty). This is my 300th post, something I never imagined when I started back in 2008. Many thanks to all whose interest has added greatly to the fun.

Sorry - rather a lot of pictures today and I'm not the cleverest sub-editor in terms of combining them with wraparound text. But here are the two Leeds butterflies, below: the Speckled Wood and then the little Gatekeeper (whose two alternative names both derive from its fondness for the edges and hedges of fields, rather than open land).

Witches and dragons

Tom and Abi have sent me this megamoth sighting from Mexico: the Black Witch which comes laden with superstition - mostly lugubrious but including one belief which I like. They say that if one flies over your head, you will go bald. No sign of that in either T or A, and most of the stories about the moth are shared by our equally innocuous Death's Head Hawk moth. Interestingly, that stood in for the Black Witch in the film of Silence of the Lambs, as per its posters. I've never seen it myself as the subject doesn't appeal at all, and I haven't read the book either. But they have this obscure entomological difference. I'm also glad to say that doomy stories about the Black Witch are countered in Texas and the Caribbean, where its appearance is said to portend a Lottery win or some other unexpected coming into dosh. It's the largest moth found in the US apparently, and Tom described theirs as 'a 747'. I'm not sure about Mexico but will try to find out.

Meanwhile, look at these two dragonflies, which relate to my recent musings about the beauties of Leeds level-pegging with those of Paxos, where Penny and I have just been on holiday. The Yorkshire one (below) is quite a lot bigger and brighter, yo! although I need to get a better picture of its emerald and turquoise flashing which are a bit obscured by all the tangly leaves. I must also look back to last year, when I featured a very similar one - possibly the same - and I'll also check out the excellent British Dragonfly Society website to find out more, which I'll add when I've more time. Quite a lot of homework today, then.

Now I've done both checks and I'd say that the Leeds dragonfly is a Southern Hawker paying a visit up North, similar to the one which P and I saw at Shandy Hall and recorded on the blog on 29 June last year. Actually, it's interesting looking back. I'd already forgotten my niece Jessie's excellent pictures of Hummingbird Hawk moths in the Pyrenees. A lot better than my Paxiot ones. If anyone can identify the Greek dragonfly, btw, I'd be most grateful.

Update: the Hawker came back this afternoon and I got this slightly brighter picture. Not perfect by any means, specially so far as focus is concerned, but getting closer to the vividness of the actual beast. And we've got real Greek blue sky too!

The naming of moths

What about moths, you may be saying - isn't this supposed to be a moths blog? And you are right. Butterflies have lured me away since getting back from Greece, but there were moths on Paxos as well. Not as many as I expected, though. Our outside lights lured only a handful and we didn't see as many in the car headlights as you do in Yorkshire on warm summer nights. It may be that the almost-monoculture of olives on the island plays a part here; our guidebook said that both bird and insect life is richer on little Antipaxos (fab beaches) where people have grown grapes more than olives. But both islands have plenty of maquis and gardens, so maybe it was just a matter of the moths remaining discreet, as moths generally tend to be.

Here's a selection anyway. I don't know what they are, but we named them the Vain Moth (examining itself in the shower room mirror, above, with shadowy Penny in the background), the Pool Edge Moth (is it a False Mocha?), the Bedroom Cupboard Moth (actually I think it's a Paxiot version of the Engrailed) and the Outside Light Moth. Penny found all but one of them. I think that I have grown lazy because of the moth trap, and she is the main spotter now. This series also gives a moment in the limelight to my other trusty helper, our Canon Ixus camera (below) whose ability to focus in my quavering hands is a constant source of wonder and joy.

The empire strikes back

More Paxos? Not today, although I'll be going back there a couple more times before settling into the usual moth trap regime. No, today is proof that Leeds can fly its flag proudly too so far as butterflies are concerned, given a sunny day. Yesterday was actually very mixed, in the usual mad English summer fashion, but for one lovely hour in the afternoon it was as warm as Greece. Out came these handsome visitors as a result: a Peacock, a Comma, a Green-veined White and a Gatekeeper or Hedge Brown. I also missed a Holly Blue and a really cracking, electric-blue and green dragonfly which was much superior to its relatives in the Ionian islands. Our buddleias are coming into bloom - the famed 'butterfly bush' - so we can expect more. Yum. I just took another look at the Peacock and, honestly, don't you think you could hardly design a more perfect butterfly?

Night and Day

Back in Paxos - which still has a stash of pictures and encounters with insects to come - here's an unusual duo: a moth flying by day (the two pics above) and a butterfly by night (see below). Strictly, this particular moth's appearance wasn't a surprise. It's one of a handful of dayflyers also found in the UK, including the red and green Burnet and Cinnabar moths - the latter the adult of the yellow and black caterpillars often found on Ragwort, looking like Wolves players in years gone by. They are an important argument for defending ragwort's summery blaze of yellow against those who call the plant a 'noxious weed' and say that it will poison all Britain's horses.

But I am rambling. This is a Hummingbird Hawk moth, fascinating to watch but tricky to photograph as it almost never comes to rest. I saw it do so just once - see rather blurred small pic of it just about to take off again - and it is remarkable to think how much energy its life must involve. In between hovering industriously over blooms with its long tongue busy (and just look at those wings whirring away in the second photo, above), it zooms around at high speed searching for new dining areas of geranium or plumbago. As I say, we do get it here and by coincidence a friend emailed just before Penny and I left for Paxos to say that she had seen one in Hebden Bridge. That is, of course, an exotic town; but the fantastically thorough records of Yorkshire Butterfly Conservation (see second-to-top link above) show that there were 40 or so sightings in the county last year, and tallies of between 14 and 375 in the last decade.



Now for the butterfly, whose appearance by night is much more unusual. It flew wildly over our heads while we were having supper outside, stopping occasionally in a daze. It is another species familiar in the UK, the Painted Lady, and here is one behaving more normally the following morning. There was a famous mass immigration of Painted Ladies into Britain last year, and many will be familiar with the butterfly. It is a very fast and capable flyer, but our night-time visitor had lost all that skill. I am sure it was dazed by the large outside light above our table, the nearest thing we had to a moth trap. A rare event. Yes, but then it is equally rare for us to have supper outside in Leeds, especially after dark and under a large lamp. If we did, this sort of thing might become the norm.

Not just peas in this pod

A brief break from the glories of Paxos today, to tell you about our pea drama. I am inordinately proud of managing to grow enough peas this year - see above - to actually accompany several meals, rather than the token helping served with a mighty fanfare in years gone by. Our younger son has been visiting, however, and was naturally suspicious of anything homegrown by us. His fears were justified. We've also had two Australian friends staying and one of them, Helen Versey, who is the privacy commissioner for the state of Victoria (roughly equivalent to heading our data protection agency), was very stern about investigating the hidden interior world of the more wizened-looking pods.



Here is what she found, above, wonderfully photo-ed by her husband David Brown whose digital camera is a machine to behold in awe. I was all for adding it to the pea pile; as David said, it must essentially be a pea in different form since it had nothing else to eat in its secret world. But others demurred. We did have the rest of the crop, however, with pasta and prawns. I enclose proof, right. Incidentally, we called the little creature a maggot, but maybe it is something more distinguished. There is a moth which I have always wanted to trap, called the Cream-bordered Green Pea, but it eats osiers, sallows and willow and is anyway very rare. There is no need to be scared of maggots btw. I recall fishermen in Whitby keeping them in the pouches of their cheeks, and also writing about a maggot farm at Thornton, near Bradford, where people with respiratory diseases used to be taken in the belief that the stench somehow did them good.

Fire and brimstone

One of the pleasures of hunting butterflies with a camera, is getting to know the flowers they patronise. The garden in our villa had this fiery-red hibiscus; like the Morning Glory, a beautiful bloom which lasts a sadly short time. The butterfly investigating it here - but apparently not interested in that amazing 'tongue' - is a Cleopatra, a species very like our own British Brimstone except for an excellent addition: two orange splodges on the forewings.

Alas, it is extremely difficult to catch these in a photograph because the butterfly folds its wings almost immediately it comes to rest on a flower. Why does it have them then. given that bold markings are usually thought to be warnings to potential predators? Perhaps it is to put off birds such as the swallows which fighter-planed round our villa in the afternoon. Certainly, the time that you see the vivid flashes of orange is when the butterfly is in flight. But you can maybe detect the tinge in this smaller photo of the underwing.


A fake Cleopatra was a cause celebre at the Natural History Museum in London. Allegedly caught in Britain at the height of 19th century collecting mania, its orange turned out to be paint. The species and its Brimstone relatives also have a major possible butterfly distinction; they are one of the leading (but unproveable) claimants to be the origin of the mysterious word 'butterfly', as 'butter-coloured flies', which indeed they are.

And here's another buttery one (below); a Pale Clouded Yellow on Paxos. Another pleasure for me too, because it's a species I'm most unlikely to find in Leeds. I see from the amazingly comprehensive 2009 yearbook of Yorkshire Butterfly Conservation (see link above left) that none were spotted in the county last year. There were 17 records of its more orangey relative the Clouded Yellow, however, including one in Barnsley. Hooray!

Aye, aye sir

Continuing with butterflies on Paxos, here's one I was specially pleased to see: the Southern White Admiral, whose name belies a wonderful mixture of colours. The black on its upper wings is more of a petrel blue, shimmering like a BP slick (below), and the underwing (above) replaces the black with that lovely tawny brown. White Admirals fly as skilfully as their human namesakes sail (apart from Sir Cloudesley Shovell of Scillies and chronometer notoriety). Sometimes they skim, sometimes power dive (I wondered initially if the prism 'meteor' in the photo was one doing that) and very occasionally they behave docilely enough for your ageing blogger to photograph. I feared that I would come home without a picture, but on our very last day we swam off a little beach called Lakkos which is backed by a wooded glen, and there was a whole colony of the butterflies. Several obligingly posed, including these two, and we celebrated afterwards at an excellent taverna up on the hill. We have our own White Admiral in the UK, very similar to the Southern one, but it will be a glorious, climate-changed day indeed if I ever see one in Leeds.



Afterthought: I meant to add that in butterfly terms, 'admiral' is a corruption of the original 'admirable' which the White and Red Admirals certainly are. I wondered if the naval term 'admiral' was itself derived from 'admirable', thus allowing us to go round in an etymological circle. But it isn't. It comes, like a surprisingly large number of English words, from Arabic: in this case 'Amir-al', meaning 'Commander of the...'

Here comes the sun

Hello again!

Apologies for my absence, though to be honest, I'm not really sorry. Who wouldn't want to spend two weeks of unrelieved sunshine, dawn to dusk every day, on the Greek island of Paxos? Naturally enough, I succumbed to the beautiful butterflies there. This blog is primarily about moths because Britain's butterfly species are so few in number and have been so well described for so many years, that I feel I have little to add. But like 99.999 percent of the human race, I naturally prefer them to moths. So bright, beautiful and vivid.

Interestingly, for those alarmists who go on about the decline of Britain's species, Paxos was not over-rich in either its number of different types of butterfly or the actual tally of individuals. Today in Leeds I have seen more on the wing - Peacocks, Holly Blues, Whites and masses of Meadow and Hedge Browns - than I did on an average day in Greece. But the Paxiots have some real crackers and here are two of them: above, the Scarce Swallowtail, which was anything but scarce. And below, the Swallowtail itself, a regal butterfly found in the UK - Norfolk's wetlands are your best chance - but only very rarely.

One occasion featured myself. I went on a press trip to the chateaux of the Loire and captured some Swallowtail caterpillars at Villandry, much to the approval and amusement of the Marquise or Duchesse who showed us round in person. They chrysalised in Leeds and some months later, when it was clear that the adult insects were about to emerge (because you could see their colours through the pupa case), I took them up to the boys' primary. That morning, to the wonderment of the children, they hatched, dried their wings and flew away towards Yeadon airport. I have always wondered if anyone saw them, and suffered sceptical frowns from butterfly recorders when they sent in a report. Both these swallowtails fly with a sort of effortless splendour, suggesting that they know their place as aristocrats of the butterfly world.

This is going to be a Paxiot blog for the next few days, as I have returned to the usual mountain of email etc and may not have time to use the light trap for a few days.