A capital catty

Well, this is a surprise. I've been in London and wasn't expecting to find anything moth-related. But here in the tiny window box of my son's flat is...a caterpillar. A marvellous tribute to Nature's powers of dispersal - and survival, in the way that grass pushes up through tarmac. The straggly nasturtiums are an island of greenery far (in moth terms) from the nearest park. But there are some good, big street trees, as you can see, and if you look carefully at the surrounding buildings, little sprouts of weeds are clinging on in various crevices behind drainpipes or in uncleaned gutters. Good luck to this caterpillar. Maybe I will bring you a picture of its chrysalis or cocoon in due course.
Stop press: I just had a closer inspection of the nasturtiums and there are TWO catties there. Here's the other one, having a nap on the soil. Actually they both seem to be asleep at the moment. The other one hasn't moved in the half-hour or so since I photographed it.

Morning all!

Excellent! We are all still here. Mind you, they haven't started colliding the particles underground in Switzerland yet.. Still, England beat Croatia 4-1 last night, so something has happened to the Earth's atomic structure. Meanwhile, here is a moth giving you the eye. Or two eyes. After a completely dismal night on Tuesday, things warmed up pleasantly yesterday. There were Red Admirals, Speckled Woods and a Holly Blue in the garden during the day, and the evening was almost sultry. Very mothy weather. It's drizzling now, but in the trap there were plenty of interesting things, prime among them this beautiful Pink-barred Sallow. It says in my book that it's 'common', but this is the first I've met since I was born in May 1950.

The end is nigh

The end of this year's trapping is in sight now. Not because of this Big Bang which scientists are recreating in the Jura mountains tomorrow. Apparently that may end the world altogether, in which case please accept this as a Goodbye. No, in moth terms, the nights are getting colder and the numbers coming to the trap are diminishing. I shall call it a day by the end of September, and also close this journal down until next Spring. That said, small numbers of interesting moths are still arriving, and here are a few. I can't find my moth Bible just at the moment, so I shall update this later on with identifications. But note that the two carpetty moths, particularly the one I take to be a Green Carpet or Green Pug, both have the habit of resting with their tails up, which I commented on several entries below. More research needed, as ever...



Incidentally, the green moth is bathed in an eerie glow because it's getting a bit overcast in the morning now, and I thought a little illumination would help. So I wore a head-torch, a bit like a miner's helmet lamp, while simultaneously juggling eggboxes and the digital camera, perched on its becoming little tripod called Miranda. Given that I was in my dressing gown as well, this must have been an inspiring sight. Luckily there was no one else there to record it.
Now it's much later on and I've been to Kendal and back and have found my Waring, Townsend & Lewington. From this I deduce that the above are: squeezed in the table gap, a Brindled Green. Then, small, a Purple Bar, a Copper Underwing and a July Highflyer. As ever, nice names.

Green thoughts

I was pondering over this Green Arches this morning and wondering why more British moths, and butterflies, don't have the colour green. Even when they do, it often appears only in subtle flecks, as here. After all, the world they live in is overwhelmingly green. When I take a photo of what my eye sees as a flower bed full of colours, the result is green, green, green, with just sprinkling of blues, reds and yellows. I was picking runner beans yesterday, and they also show the effectiveness of green as camouflage. It's quite tricky detecting bean from leaf or stalk, and some grow enormous as a result. Yet moths are famously ace at camouflage. Through evolution, some have proved to be as clever as chameleons. The Amulet moth has three different forms in England alone - whitish in chalkland areas, russet in South Devon where the sandstone is a similar colour and much darker in Surrey, where the soil is black. Maybe soil and stone are the answer, for the adult insect. Perhaps they are at most danger when at rest in the daytime. Certainly, moths have a famous propensity for resembling old leaves. They have got green in their genes, though. It's the favourite colour of their caterpillars, which lends weight to the daytime theory. The Very Hungry Caterpillar is well-named. They spend all day munching green leaves and grass.

Here's to you, Mr and Mrs Robinson

After discussing the Setaceous Hebrew Character yesterday, I idly looked it up in Moths by Prof Edmund Ford, the Bible of Bibles, and discovered an amazing fact. He says that shortly after the Robinsons invented their wonder-trap at the end of the 1940s, no fewer than 50,000 Setaceous Hebrew Characters were caught in a single trap in Hampshire during the course of one night. Fifty thousand? It beggars belief. But Ford makes a point which should be noted by anyone nervous about eco-doom when he goes on to say that the then new practice of light-trapping had "shown that some species long thought to be rare are abundant, and others exist where they have never before been recorded." There still aren't that many of us looking. Anyway, if you follow the British weather, you will know that we are all building arks this weekend. Torrents. So here's a dip back to July and an Iron Prominent which I didn't show you at the time. It looks poised for some menacing action. Also, smaller pic, this is what it looks like for a flower as a Buff Tip approaches.

A distinguished character

There's an end-of-season feeling this morning. It's cold and wet again and I sense that trapping days are numbered, for this year. Only half-a-dozen moths were snoozing in the eggboxes this morning, but this is an interesting one. It's very common; I should have mentioned it before. It's the Setaceous Hebrew Character and it comes trailing clouds of glory. According to legend, this moth was present when Moses received the Ten Commandments from God but was not allowed to see the divine face. The moth, however, did. And because it confessed this dreadful fact to God at once, it was rewarded by having the Hebrew Character 'Nun' imprinted on its wings instead of being smitten as happens to so many people and things in the Bible. According to the excellent website www.flwildflowers.com, 'nun' is also shorthand for 'miracle' which is what this presumably was. The website adds charmingly that in Yiddish accounts the moth is described as 'fermisht', or 'all shook up', and says that the exchange on the mountain was possible because 'the language of moths is something that only the Divine knows.' So, now you know too. Setaceous, btw, means 'bristly' or unshaven. There is another moth in Britain called simply the Hebrew Character, which also has a 'nun' mark but less distinct. Why this one is considered unshaven, I have yet to discover.

Slowly but surely

It's cold and wet and this is bad for moths but good for snails. Fortunately I walk about 1000 times faster than a snail and so I beat this one to the top of the trap. I don't think snails eat moths but they probably enjoy all the bits and bobs and tiny flies which end up in the big black plastic bowl. The moth at the top looks nothing much from a distance, but its antennae are lovely, aren't they? I hadn't actually noticed 'til I Photoshopped the picture below.
I thought 'til then the moth was an Engrailed, but I reckon the antennae mean that it's a Grey Scalloped Bar. Jax will tell us. Snails are phenomenal climbers. We often see them creeping up our bedroom windows, miles (for a snail) above the ground. Where are they going? Is this further proof of magnetism being the Unknown Force?

razzle dazzle

Here's a dashing moth. The Angle Shades. There's nothing else like it in Britain, not even the Small Angle Shades which doesn't have the dramatically raked wings. Most unusually, the Angle Shades furls these like an umbrella when at rest. As with the Hooktips which I mention some way below, moth specialists link the dramatic wing shape not to flying skills but to camouflage and I think my picture rather bears that out.
The steeply angled leading edge, the empty fantail and the patterns combine to confuse, exactly as in the Dazzle camouflage pioneered on ships in the First World War. I have a marvellous essay on this somewhere in an exhibition catalogue called Camouflage, written by an outwardly staid Royal Navy officer called Wilkinson who even managed to persuade the Admiralty to paint warships pink. If you search Dazzle camouflage on Google Image you will have a happy time.
Here's the Angle Shades, too, on a blank background (the inside of the moth trap), showing its odd outline. If you click on this pic to enlarge it, you can study the furls and the jet engine shape more closely, along with some tiny flies which were also dazed by my light.

One finger, one thumb...

No trapping last night; the weather was dodgy, although in the event it doesn't seem to have rained. So here's a postcard which my younger son's just sent from Stuttgart (courtesy of Galerie Daniel Buchholz). It's a nice image, and thanks to the extraordinary power of the internet, you can discover in five minutes a wealth of information about the artist involved, Jack Goldstein. The pic is a clip from a short film he made in 1975 called Some Butterflies. You can download it from http://greylodge.org/gpc/?p=513 and the smaller pic of it being screened at a gallery is from http://www.artnet.com/artwork/54109/2/some-butterflies-from-a-program-of-ten-16mm-films-1974-1978.html. Sorry about these long addresses.
I wouldn't say it's specially riveting, but Goldstein was a significant influence on modern artists using film. Sadly, he took his own life at the age of 57, shortly before his work received widespread recognition. Such people make me hope that there's an afterlife. Van Gogh above all. He would be (may be) amazed at the prices now fetched by his work. Famously, he sold only one painting in his lifetime, Red Vineyard at Arles, now in the Pushkin, for 400 francs, or about £800 at today's values. I wonder if the occasional appearance of my fingers and thumb in this record will one day constitute Fine Art.

Thin red line

Moths' names are often inspired but difficult to fathom. I've got a whole stack of winter evenings lined up to research some of the ones I've described since May. No problem here, however. This is the Bloodvein and it's easy to see why. I'm sorry the picture is a bit blurred but the moth led me a merry dance. I was all lined up to photograph it in the trap, but when I moved its eggbox, it fluttered off. I followed it to this honeysuckle but had to stand on tiptoes to get the camera close enough. Result, blurr. But I hope the vein is clear enough. There are plenty of other 'bodypart' moths, including an impressive range of Ears.

What have you got up your sleeve?

Here's a moth which sounds like a supporting character in a Thomas Hardy novel. The Rosy Rustic. I imagine my ancestors were like this, given the meaning of my surname. Rustics can get a lot rosier than this one, but isn't the patterning fine, even if the palette is like something from Laura Ashley's autumn collection in a year favouring beige? I think I'll add a picture of the other sort of rosy rustic just for comparison.
The other thing that happened yesterday was that I came in from the garden with a friend on the arm of my jumper - see below. I think it may be one of the pesky 'cabbage white' caterpillars I mentioned yesterday, but please put me right if I'm wrong.

Drying out

I didn't know moths could swim, until yesterday. I don't suppose they can do it for long, but there was one in the bath zooming around like Rebecca Adlington, only not in such straight lines. I fished it out and was interested to see that it then adopted this butterfly pose - wings high above the back which moths very seldom do - presumably to make it easier to dry out. The second, smaller picture, shows a sideways view.
I think it's a Rustic of some kind. Your dead average brown, boring moth. Penny and I were on a marvellous excursion, launching A Good Year for Blossom, a collection of Guardian Country Diaries by women (ideal Christmas present etc, see link to books...thanks). We stayed at the former home of one of the diarists Gwen McBryde, Dippersmoor Manor, near Hereford. It is now an outstanding B&B with marvellous hosts Hexie and Amanda Millais (H is the great-grandosn of the celebrated artist). Go there! http://www.dippersmoor.com/ The third pic is of a pretty litte Magpie moth which also lives at Dippersmoor.

A cheerful end to August

Hooray - an interesting end to August. A Phoenix moth appeared in the trap this morning. I'm still researching the reason for the name, but it's a step bigger than the Carpet moths which have similar wing patterns, and altogether grander. In the course of Googling just now, I came across an American poet who has hymned the moth - see http://stormwrack.blogspot.com/2006/11/phoenix-moth.html. These insects get everywhere. My Phoenix lit off pretty quickly once the trap was open, but if you click on my pic, you can detect its odd habit of resting with the back of its body arched up.

Only the male does this - a good example (of which the animal world furnishes countless others) for writers on gender studies. I've filched these two smaller pics from Wikipedia because they show the practice much more strikingly than I have managed to do. Isn't the little blue hole in the bottom one excellent? Many thanks Wiki-world, as ever.
PS The little creature examining the Phoenix is one of a horde of micro moths which currently infest the trap. They actually outnumber the various yellow underwings.

Why bother with moths?

It was a very drab catch last night, so let's truant. The buddleia has been swarming these last few bright days with some of the loveliest of Britain's butterflies. Here's a Comma enjoying the overwhelming scent of honey with a Peacock. Down below, perhaps the finest of them all, a Red Admiral. The word has changed, slightly, from the original Red Admirable.
There's a White Admiral, too, a wonderfully delicate looking butterfly which I've only seen overseas. But these other ones are common and a daily delight in August - when the sun shines. So why bother with moths? I guess that it's because there are so many more of them than butterflies and they are mysterious and confusing and challenging. We have fewer than 60 kinds of butterfly and it doesn't take long to get to know them. Moths take a lifetime, and (if there is a Beyond) beyond.

Tiger, tiger

My sister Tessa is today's moth recorder, snatching this action pic with her mobile phone after an exciting chase. She's been on a flying visit to Lyme Regis from Bradford, where you don't get moths like this. Even if one smuggled itself in with a wool batch, they'd intercept it in today's equivalent of the old Conditioning House. I went past that the other day, recalling a tour I was given there years ago for a piece about anthrax in the Bradford Telegraph & Argus. It looks as though it's being handsomely converted, like Lister's Mill and so many other fine stone buildings in the city. Anyway, if you've been paying attention, you'll know that this is a Jersey Tiger, previously encountered by Martin's Moths in Turkey in June. It was flying in the sun and Tess naturally thought it was a butterfly, russet like a fritillary in flight, then magically cream and dark chocolate at rest (albeit with a scrap of the vivid underwing just showing). It's an immigrant from France or the Channel Islands and a very welcome one. I like the background and must check with Tess what it is.
I've added a couple of Turkish Jersey Tigers, below, for contrast. Interesting, the oily effect of their dark scales reflecting my camera flash. Click on the pic for even more awesome viewing...

Oranges and a lemon

More colour than usual in the trap this morning. Meet the Sallows. The lemon moth is an ordinary Sallow, the one with a purpley bit, a Centre-Barred Sallow and the other three are their relative, the Dun Bar, albeit one has slightly different patterning from the other two. It was a warmish, dry night which perhaps brought them out.
There was also a nice Lesser Swallow Prominent, as featured previously, and this smaller, beautifully marked moth. Needless to say, I am now deep in Waring, Townsend and Lewington trying to work out which it is. (Update: answer, thanks to Jax, is a Marble Beauty. Appropriate name.)

A very hungry caterpillar

It's taken me a long time to show a caterpillar here. That's because they're hard to find. Moths are bad enough, unless you have a light trap like mine, but caterpillars are experts in the art of hiding. I only saw this one because the geraniums needed watering. Mind you, the great big chunks it had eaten out of the leaves were a clue, and if you really want to find caterpillars, look for similar damage on cabbage-type plants. You will almost certainly discover the cream, green and blue caterpillars of the Large, Small and Green-veined White butterflies. Similarly, earlier in the year - say June or early July - inspecting nettles should turn up colonies of the spiky black caterpillars of the Small Tortoiseshell. A few of these are well worth keeping, if you have children, as they hatch into lovely butterflies. Take care with the nettles (although they, too, are worth gathering for a sort of tastier-than-spinach soup. What does caterpillar mean? Here's the dictionary definition:

"catyrpel" of 1440, derived from French "chatepelose" (?), meaning "hairy cat" (cf. "pile", "pilose", from Latin "pilus" = "hair"; "pill", as in either medicine lozenge or fuzzball, like the hairballs cats regurgitate up, from Latin "pila" = "ball, originally knot of hair"). See also pussy willows and catkins, similar shapes and fuzzinesses associated with the feline. Or from "piller", meaning "pillager/ravager", and "cate", meaning "food" (root of today's "caterer"), as caterpillars devour leaves.

They're in the Bible too, in the famous quote which gave us the phrase 'locust years.' (The Bible is very strong on insects, especially the Book of Deuteronomy): "I will restore to you the years that the locust hath eaten, the cankerworm, and the caterpillar, and the palmerworm, my great army which I send among you." Joel 2:25

Oh what a beautiful morning...

...at last! Sunshine, warmth, all the things they need at the Leeds Festival just up the road. That would be a good place to run a trap. Not many moths here, meanwhile, but some nice ones. I specially like these T-shaped plume moths, although nailing down exactly which one is which is currently beyond me. I just checked out a US website - Joe Biden's the Obama running mate btw - and there are 154 which look like this in the States alone. There are plenty in Leeds too. Also here: an aptly-named Beautiful Golden Y which settled within inches of the dazzling mercury vapour light, a Straw Dot and something very distinctive which nonetheless I cannot (yet) name. Where is Jax?

Two carpets, miles apart

Obama is going to text out the name of his running mate today apparently, so here's an American moth in his honour (and McCain's, to be even-handed). Sarah Meredith - see artist link on my list - emailed it to me. With her artist's eye, she spotted its decision to find a background similar to its own colouring. Is it a decision? Or is that the Lamarckian Heresy? How can we tell? Camouflage has become one of the themes of this journal but up to now, I'm unconvinced that simply tabulating data about the number of moths which choose appropriate backgrounds, and corresponding figures for those which don't, will actually prove the point. I had to write about adders the other day, following my encounter with one (see several entries below), and I was very pleased when the leading expert said honestly: "There's a lot we don't know about adders." Ditto moths. Anyway, Sarah's is some sort of carpet moth, even if it has chosen a blanket or a throw to rest on. Maybe they're called Throw Moths in the States. Sarah can tell us.
By coincidence the only interesting moth in a very sparse trap last night (it was cold and clear; autumn coming; woe) was also a carpet. Here it is. I am immersed in the baffling task of trying to sort out which of the infuriatingly similiar types it is. There was also a lovely micro called the Mother of Pearl moth but it was wide awake and jittery. I approached it with my camera like a stealthy paparazzo but it spotted me and fluttered away.

Son of Bob

Waterspouts and hurricanoes. If the moth trap had been out last night it would have floated away. I can't really complain, compared with businesses in York, where the entire Ebor racing festival has been washed out. The Yorkshire economy has been clobbered by the rain for the second year running - last 'summer' it was the Game Fair at Harewood which was cancelled in a sea of mud. Before the rain came, this delicate little Clouded Border paid a call, not into the trap but on to heather nearby. Otherwise, our most exciting visitor was Son of Bob, seen here watching the self-important Huw Edwards boring on in Beijing.
Bob was an enormous spider who boldly came out to join us regularly a few years back. This one is more likely to be great-great-great-grandson of Bob, if Wikipedia is correct in saying that spiders live only a year or two (other than female tarantulas which can apparently reach 20, although Wiki honestly adds 'citation needed' for that alarming fact). Talking of accuracy, Jax suggests that the moths in the entry below are a Rivulet (left) and a Flame Carpet. She's always right, though simply from the illustrations in my book, my diagnosis looks correct. The trouble is, moth patterns vary. It's like that bit in 1066 And All That on the Irish Question where it says that whenever Gladstone got close to the correct answer, the Irish changed the question. Bob's descendant scuttled off gloomily after the TV weather forecast. Please may we have some sun.

Population explosion

Why are there so many Large Yellow Underwings in Leeds? The trap was packed with them last night. As we know, the blackbird eats them, and we have plenty of blackbirds. But still there are hordes. Here's one eggbox, typical of many, and there just as many LYUs on its other side. A couple of interesting smaller moths too.

Here's a relative (right) of Michael Meadowcroft's Garden Carpet, featured yesterday. This is the Dark-barred Twin-spot Carpet, a long name for a little moth. The other pic (left) is of one of the few types of moth which imitate butterflies when at rest by folding their wings above their backs, rather than on them. I'm still trying to work out what it is. And I think (some hours later, with the day's work done) that it's a Small Argent & Sable. Please correct me in the Comment slot if I'm wrong. Update: It's the following morning now - see entry above for latest Jax-Info on this fascinating debate.

House and Garden

I wasn't going to do an entry this morning, partly because it continues to rain and partly because I'm in mourning for one of the Sparrowhawks I mentioned the other day. It flew straight into our sitting room window and broke its neck. This has happened previously with a fine thrush and a greenfinch and it's always upsetting. You get the chance to look at a beautiful bird closely, but that's all. On the cheerful side, several others including a hen blackbird have hit the windows and recovered after a rest and some water. Anyway, I just opened the email and Michael Meadowcroft has sent me this third moth, adding that he never knew that Bramley was so full of them. Indeed it is, as is everywhere in the country. This one's a Garden Carpet, as in the Flanders & Swann song about the garden being full of furniture and the house full of plants.

An Olympic fan

After the menacing patterns on yesterday adder, here's some innocuous marking. But equally striking. This delicate visitor to the trap is a Twenty Plume moth. Its name is a delight to a journalist prone to error; it actually has 24 plume-like segments to its wings. Its Linnaean name, Alucita hexadactyla, compounds the confusion by meaning 'six-plumed', although to be fair, the scientists were thinking in terms of each wing. The plume moths have an interesting ability to fold their wings along each plume. increasing their resemblance to an Oriental fan. An appropriate image, maybe, to honour our success in the Olympics (and, glory be, almost all done by cheerful athletes who don't sulk).
The Twenty Plume is very common but largely overlooked by the busy world. But not by John Curtis, the early English mothman, who painted it in this picture in his 'British Entomology', a 16 volume marathon which took him from 1824 to 1839.