Good Housekeeping, Vol 2

It rained last night and the forecast is for more. Not many people are complaining about that, especially down south, although spare a thought for June brides today. What a lottery our English weather is.

Anyway, I have been using the time to check out the number of different species which have come to my trap; and before that, those which I saw by other means, including a pretty unproductive but stickily enjoyable rum-and-treacling session with small cousins five or six years ago. The news is, that we have hit 200, including a dozen or so micros. I have been very conservative in my counting, not adding varieties or aberrations as extras, and I know for certain that half-a-dozen at least of small, boring or otherwise baffling moths have escaped this census.

Anyway, here they are, with the new ones since my first (and last) attempt at Good Housekeeping on 1st August 2009, when the tally was 158, in bold. I've included a couple of pictures of the other night's micromoths with lurid scale indicators such as my blurred thumb, to stop this post looking too boring.

Alder, Angle Shades, Angle-striped Sallow, Antler, Autumnal Rustic, Barred Red, Barred Yellow,Beautiful Golden Y, Black Rustic, Blackneck, Blair’s Shoulder Knot, Bloodvein, Bordered White, Bright-line Brown-eye, Brimstone, Brindled Green, Brown China Mark, Brown Silver-line, Buff Arches, Buff Ermine, Buff Footman, Buff Tip, Burnished Brass, Canary-shouldered Thorn, Centre-barred Sallow, Chestnut, Chimney Sweeper, Cinnabar, Clouded Border, Clouded-bordered Brindle (plus ab Combusta), Clouded Drab, Clouded Brindle, Clouded Silver, Common Carpet, Common Emerald, Common Footman, Common Marbled Carpet, Common Quaker, Common Rustic, Common Swift, Common Wainscot, Common Wave, Common White Wave, Common Yellow Underwing, Copper Underwing and/or Svensson’s C.U. (impossible to distinguish without expert help), Coxcomb Prominent, Cream Wave, Crescent, Dark Arches, Dark-barred

Twin-spot Carpet, Dark Brocade, Dark Dagger, Dark Marbled Carpet, Dark Spectacle, Dark Swordgrass, Dot, Dun-bar, Dusky Brocade, Dusky Thorn, Early Grey, Early Thorn, Elephant Hawk, Engrailed, Fan-foot, Feathered Thorn, Figure of 80, Flame, Flame Carpet, Flame Shoulder, Flounced Rustic, Foxglove Pug, Frosted Orange, Garden Carpet, Ghost, Gold Spangle, Gold Spot, Golden-rod Pug, Gothic, Green Arches, Green-brindled Crescent, Green Carpet, Green Pug, Green Silver Lines, Grey Arches, Grey Birch, Grey Dagger, Grey Scalloped Bar, Heart and Dart, Hebrew Character, Herald, Ingrailed Clay, Iron Prominent, July Highflyer, Knot Grass, Large Emerald, Large Yellow Underwing, Lead-coloured Drab, Lempke’s Gold Spot

Lesser Broad-bordered Yellow Underwing, Lesser Common Rustic, Lesser Swallow Prominent, Light Emerald, Lime Hawk including Var Brunnea, Lunar Underwing, Lunar Marbled Brown, Lychnis, Marbled Beauty, Marbled Minor, May Highflyer, Micros: Barred Fruit-tree Tortrix (Pandemis ceranasa) - shown above with a Poplar Hawk moth wing for scale - Bird-cherry Ermine, Brown Grey (Scoparia ambigualis), Catopria margaritella, Diurnia fagella, Dipleurina lacustrata, Emmelina monodactyla, Garden Rose Tortrix, Green Oak Roller (Tortrix viridiana), Mother of Pearl, Plume (Stenophilia sp.), Pyrausta aurata, Spindle Ermine, 20-plume, Ypsolopha Sequella, Middle-barred Minor, Miller, Mottled Beauty, Mottled Rustic, Narrow-bordered Five-spot Burnet, November moth, Oak Hooktip, Orange Swift, Orange Underwing, Pale Brindled Beauty, Pale Mottled Willow, Pale Pinion, Pale Prominent, Pale-shouldered Brocade, Pale Tussock (including dark variety), Peach Blossom, Pebble Hook Tip, Pebble Prominent, Peppered (including melanistic variety), Phoenix, Pink-barred Sallow, Plain Golden Y, Poplar Hawk, Purple Bar

Purple Thorn, Red Underwing, Red-green Carpet, Red-lined Quaker, Riband Wave, Rivulet, Rosy Rustic, Ruby Tiger, Rufous Minor, Sallow, Sallow Kitten, Satin Beauty, Satellite, Scalloped Hazel (including var nigra), Scalloped Hook-tip, Scalloped Oak, Scarce Silver Lines, Scorched Wing, September Thorn, Setaceous Hebrew Character, Shaded Broad-bar, Shoulder-striped Wainscot, Shuttle-shaped Dart, Silver Y, Single-dotted Wave, Slender Brindle, Small Angle Shades, Small Fanfoot, Small Fan-footed Wave, Small Magpie, Small Phoenix, Small Quaker, Smoky Wainscot, Snout, Spectacle, Spruce Carpet, Square-spot Rustic, Straw Dot, Streamer, Swallow Prominent, Swallowtailed, Treble Bar, True Lover’s Knot, Twin-spotted Quaker, V-pug, White Ermine, Willow Beauty, Winter moth, Yellow-line Quaker

Hooray! Great names, aren't they?

Finally, I have cracked Charlie's last clue (see posts below) to reveal Scoparia ambigualis or the Brown Grey moth. Like the others in his puzzle, it has been here before, so I should have recognised it. Here it is again, anyway, to conclude today's proceedings, shown for scale beside a Heart and Dart.

Old friends, old scenes, will lovelier be...

The season moves on, and familiar faces from this time last year - or in some cases a few weeks ahead because of the warmer Spring this time round - have started to congregate in the trap. Above we've got a rather handsome Dusky Brocade and then I think that these two below are Common Rustics,a famously variable moth. Update. No we haven't got a Dusky Brocade, sorry. It's a rather handsome Grey Arches. Thanks to Ben the Real Expert (see Comments) who also nails the third moth as a Clouded-bordered Brindle.

As for this pretty little Carpet, reading the Egg Code upside down, below, I had to put on my strong reading glasses to try to work out which one it is of a similar-looking bunch in Waring, Townend and Lewington. That wasn't conclusive so I went to UK Moths on the internet and I'm plumping for the Silver-ground Carpet, a lovely and dainty little moth.

I have just finished writing an enormously long piece, by my paltry standards, for the Observer on the massive growth of interest in moths. They are the New Birdwatching! Yo! Should be in on Sunday.

Seven out of eight (so far)

Hmmm... I think Charlie's fixed the bar a bit high in the Grand Competition which he set in the post below. I just checked a new discovery of mine on this blog - the section called Stats in the organising page - and I see to my amazement and joy that people have landed on the site from Brazil, Iran and other far-flung spots. But they must still be puzzling over the Fletcher Anagrams, and very nobly not feeding them into an anagram decoding machine, because no one has come up with answers, yet.

I haven't done any anagram machine cheating either, and I'm still puzzling over the second micro - the asparagus clue. But I've cracked the other seven and since I don't want to prolong competitors' agonies or the travails of Worm (see Comment on post below), here they are in the order of Charlie's clues.

Shuttle-shaped Dart
Common Marbled Carpet
Dusky Brocade
Large Yellow Underwing
Pandemis cerasana (that was tough) Also known as The Barred Fruit Tree Tortrix
Rustic Shoulder Knot
Pale Mottled Willow

...and then the mystery moth. More on that when I finally triumph, unless someone beats me to it. If you do, you will win the Valuable Prize, because otherwise I will have to award it to Charlie who is claiming it on the logical but morally dubious grounds that he knows the answers.

None of the above are new here, incidentally, which shows the difficulty of moth identification, at least so far as I am concerned.

This is the first post on this blog not to have a picture. Fact.
It is also the first to be posted from a mobile on a train. Groundbreaking stuff...

Test your wits...

Tarantara!

Here is only the second competition in the blog's history. (The first was the Great Heart-and-Dart Guessing Game, mentioned a few posts below).

I wasn't planning this, but there was quite a good catch of hard-for-me-to-identify moths in the trap last night (the weather turning nice again, after a cold, wet snap). On a whim, I emailed pictures of eight of them to my local expert Charlie Fltcher and also Jax Westmoreland of Yorkshire Butterfly Conservation - fatally adding that "I am planning to identify them later."

Here is Charlie's reply, which is also the Second Grand Competition. I suppose I asked for it. I should and will try to puzzle it out myself, but all friendly readers and commentors are most welcome to join in. I promise not to look...

Over to Charlie:

Hi Martin

Another selection of nice brown moths I see!

As you are going to have a stab at solving them yourself, I won't identify them directly, but here are anagrams of the common names - or scientific names for the two micros:



3348 Hustled death-traps (this is the female)
3356 Becalm port commander
3359 Duckboard? Yes!
3366 Willowy gender granule
3370 Academia spanners
3372 Undershirt-lockouts
3377 Little moped wallow
3386 Iambic asparagus oil (I'm sure you use this in your cooking!)

And here are the moths (in the order given above) for competition fans to identify.

Happy brain-crunching! I will try to think of a nice prize for all who enter.

I really won't cheat, I swear. But they are brown and grey and quite difficult, don't you agree? Note that bit of blue on Moth No.4's wing btw. I'm very interested in that.

xM

A green thought in a green shade

I was thinking of having one of my occasional rants about the absence of blue, my favourite colour, in moths; but I am consoled by two arrivals in different shades of green, which is the one I like second best.

The first is this little fellow above, the Green Oak Roller, a micro-moth which tends to get people like me excited in the hope that it might be a similar but far rarer macro called the Cream-bordered Green Pea. Now isn't that a nice name? The C-bGP has an even scarcer relative called the Spiny Bollworm, with a rather more olive, foreign appearance, appropriately as its home is Africa and it comes here only as an exceedingly infrequent migrant. It lost out in the name stakes but is one of the UK's more famous moths, as an example was found in the light trap at Buckingham Palace in 1964, shortly after a state visit from Tanzania.

Here by contrast is the wonderfully subtle Green Arches, whose colouring comes and goes to the human eye, depending on the light. It isn't always easy to get the beauty across in a photo, but I quite like this one of it apparently striding away with its long dress trailing behind it, like Queen Elizabeth I after her experience with the puddle and Sir Walter Raleigh's cloak.

Gem in the stingers

Jewelled beetles are not the monopoly of the tropics or the gorgeous East. We had a lovely walk at Gargrave yesterday and spotted this gleam of turquoise, the colour of the Turk, in a clump of nettles. It was an industrious Green Nettle Weevil which is not only fearless of the poisonous spikes which cover the plant quite impressively in the close-up pic below. It eats them.

The nettle weevil family is black underneath the layer of iridescent sheen, and as the year goes on, many of them lose their beautiful top coat, just as we get wrinkly after the bloom of youth. For the weevil it probably matters less than it does to all those misguided souls who spend money on Botox et al. Weevils just go on eating nettle.

If you live within reach of Gargrave, I thoroughly recommend the walk - following the Pennine Way north from near the church to a lonely signpost in a field between the summits of the village's little Everests, Mickleber and Scaleber hills, then down to the flight of locks at Bank Newton and back along the canal towpath to the village. Gargrave is a favourite example in talks I give on the need for optimism about the UK's North. When the last big cotton mill closed after the 1929 crash, things looked disastrous; but Johnson & Johnson down in Slough were looking to locate somewhere cleaner and set up a huge (but very discreetly-sited) factory, which benefited additionally from local skills in the making of its main product, cotton wool. It's Systagenix now, but still a fine example of skilled and interesting jobs which allow a wide range of people to live in this little piece of Paradise.

Unmet by moonlight

Proving a negative is inevitably rather unexciting and I'm afraid that's what I did last night. As we went to bed, I remarked to Penny about the bright moon and fell asleep in a sort-of muddled reverie about passages in Prof Ford's mighty work Moths about the effect of moonlight on moth navigation.

There are a number of fables about moths flying to the moon - usually with an Icarus-style moral of over-ambition - and indeed you can watch a little film on the subject here. But there is plenty of serious work suggesting that the lure of light traps such as mine is much-reduced when Nature's vastly more powerful lamp is shining in clear skies, as we had last night.

So there were only a dozen moths slumbering this morning, among them this smartly-coloured Ingrailed Clay, above. In the context of my moon musings, it looks appropriately as though it is a vast spaceship flying through the Milky Way, but that is in fact the inside of my moth trap (hence the not-quite-focussed image from the plastic 'glare', sorry). Like almost moths this year, it is on the wing some weeks earlier that you would normally expect. 'Ingrailed' is one of those words you can inadvertently use without thinking what it actually means. Usually spelt 'engrailed', it refers to the line of dots on the wing edge, as also seen on a lot of coins. Knowledge, eh! Worship the great god Google...

Just a couple of other things, in case any of my expert pals are reading. I'd be very grateful for identifications on these two visitors, left and below. Meanwhile I hope that the sun is shining on you as it is on Leeds and that you have a lovely weekend.

Waspish remarks

It isn't only moths which end up in my light trap. Bees are regulars, especially what you might call the 'mini-bumble' kind. So are wasps, millions of midges and one occasion a very angry sparrow. Angry but well-fed. I also get a steady range of oddities - to me - such as this alarming-looking creature. If anyone knows what it is, I'd be grateful for the info. Some sort of ichneumon wasp? Stop press: all is revealed, by the noble Worm. See Comments, and shudder...



Meanwhile, here below is another candidate for the Most Boring title, in what hometown America would probably call the Pee-Wee class.

I once had the good fortune to be in Hannibal, Missouri, on 4 July, and the wonderfully homespun parade included an impressive turnout of Pee-Wees, successors to Mark Twain who grew up in the place (which is so far away from tourism land, that it has hardly any of the Stratford/Haworth shrine element to its everyday makeup). I have absolutely no idea which micro-moth this is. Sorry. Again, if any learned reader can come to my aid...

Finally, we all leave our slips showing from time to time, and this Bright-Line Brown-Eye moth is no exception. Satisfyingly, there is also a Brown-Line Bright-Eye moth but they are rarer and I have yet to see one here.

A trio of (not so) boring moths

A commentor on a recent post asked me which I considered to be the most boring of moths. I'm working on that but meanwhile here's by the far most common arrival in the trap at the moment, the Heart and Dart.

In the very first month of my blogging, June 2008, I made this species the subject of a mini competition to guess its name, giving only the clue that it described the wing patterning and was a rhyme with the structure 'blank and blank.' I got some good answers: nail and pail, wing and thing, dash and splash, pole and hole; and also an email from a New York shop called Heart and Dart which sold tea (and may still, although Googling suggests it could be defunct).

So the H&D can stimulate interest and I guess that it is also saved from the boring title by its variety of shades, shown in the picture. All three are Hearts and Darts, from more than 60 which swarmed in on Tuesday night (it is the moth of the moment here). You could argue, mind, that its choice of colour makes it even more of a candidate for boring status. I mean, small and brown, small and grey, small and slightly darker brown...

But then interest resurfaces, because I see from another pic I used back in 2008, in July, that the Large Yellow Underwing (which will soon arrive here in even bigger numbers than the H&D) chooses pretty much the same trio of colours from its palette. Is this to do with camouflage and natural selection? More research for my retirement.

Nosy parker

A curious beast today - the Snout moth. No prizes for guessing how it came by its name; it has the most pronounced set of palps of any of its UK brethren. Palps seem to be subject of science's ongoing quest for certain knowledge, but they certainly play an important role as a sensory organ, a sort-of back up for antennae. Why the Snout should have such magnificent ones remains a subsidiary mystery.

It's also one of those moths which have the look of the United States' military hardware. A 'stealth moth' maybe - and that isn't so fanciful when you recall - see earlier posts - that various types of Yellow Underwing know how to send out decoy radar signals to confuse predatory bats. Talking of antennae, there was a lively maybug or cockchafer in the trap this morning and I couldn't resist homing in on its magnificent pair. Shortly after this photoshoot it took off, more like an RAF Hercules than a stealth fighter, and soared away higher than our (quite high) house.

Hawk-eyed

I cut this picture below out of the Sunday Telegraph a couple of years ago, thinking that I might use it next time an Eyed Hawk moth came along. Now one has, although not to the trap in person, but via my illustrious Guardian colleague Chris Thomond whose photographs do a matchless job of illustrating northern England (and elsewhere) in the paper and online.

He's visited a nursery called Guardian Angels where the subject of moths must have come up, because the children and staff gave him this photograph below - blurred but in a rather nice, Impressionist way - which he emailed to me last night for identification with the alarming note: 23 toddlers await your verdict.

Well toddlers (and staff): you have done BRILLIANTLY, photographing an Eyed Hawk which is one of the UK's biggest and most excitingly-coloured moths. It is extremely unusual in having a dash of blue in its colouring; for reasons not yet understood but probably to do with flying at night rather than in the light, blue is almost unheard-of in UK moths. There are about three species with just a dab of it.

More interestingly, the Eyed Hawk is an example of 'double protection' against predators such as birds. Its forwings have the classic moth camouflage of subdued colours and a complex, veiny pattern which allows the insect to merge into leaf litter or similar natural backgrounds where it sleeps by day. But if movement or something else gives it away, a flick of the wings forward reveals the startling 'eyes'. We know from other examples such as the famous Peacock butterfly, below, that these form an effective scare for birds.

I think that the Sunday Telegraph was being a bit Beatrix Potterish, or anthropomorphic to use the long official word, to suggest that the moth might resemble a fox. The likeness is very striking to our eyes, but birds see (and presumably think) very differently; and even though the Eyed Hawk is a large moth, it is tiny compared to a fox.

Moths do need this protection. This morning there was a pretty little Magpie moth in the trap which fluttered off from its eggbox just as I was preparing to photograph it - because it is an interesting species in that genetic experiments were carried out on a colony by the surgeon (and keen moth man) Sir Geoffrey Keynes, brother of Maynard, the economist who saved the capitalist system. I watched it flutter away to a clump of primroses - but so did a robin, which swooped down like a Spitfire. RIP Magpie moth.

What have you been on?

I often compare my snoozing morning moths to students after a heavy night out, and here's an appropriate example. This vivid Brimstone moth, suitably representative of the current lovely sunny weather, had real trouble getting it together when I came to inspect the egg boxes. As you can see from the picture above, it managed in the end; and indeed, it finally fluttered off under its own steam rather than being decanted with the other sleepyheads deep inside a sheltering rhododendron bush. But its waking process involved a series of curious gymnastics; the half-bodyflip on the left above is specially impressive (look at how the legs on the left are clinging on...) Then it played dead for a while, betrayed only by its beady, very-much-alive eye, below.

The Brimstone is a common moth but very lovely in its colouring. You may well see it out and about by day, if you brush past a rowan or hawthorn. Follow it to its resting place, however, and you may be impressed at how subtly that bright colouring disappears and the slightly more pastel underwing looks just like a dying leaf. Brimstones are somewhat feckless in their breeding habits, like humans but unlike most, highly predictable UK moths, and consequently may be seen on the wing almost any time from Spring to late autumn.

Bonanaza night

Oooh we've got some glories this morning! I feel overwhelmed and dangerously close to gush mode. Penny had to wait quite a long time for her bacon and tomato, so busy was I with the eggboxes, camera and treasures such as the Light Emerald, above. (She'd cooked it btw and in fact this morning she also made our early morning tea because I overslept, like a moth in the trap). This is the first emerald here in 2011 and I've also seen my first Large Yellow Underwing. I may feel a bit hectic now, but when the days of 100-plus assorted yellow underwings arrive, which is clearly going to be soon, then quiet mornings with a few dainty species will be a thing of the past.

Look at this Common Swift, too, (above,with a shadowy Scalloped Hazel in the neighbouring eggbox). What delicate and beautiful colouring. Penny was just looking at some pictures of Forester moths at breakfast time, over my shoulder as I tried to distinguish between Common and Gold Swifts, and remarking on the two-tone (green and silvery grey) similarity to Empire-line dresses in a famous film or TV version of Jane Austen. I am sure that dress designers are aware of moth patterns and colourings, as well as birds'. Actually, Moth would be an excellent name for a fashion house.

And here is the Burnished Brass, on its own and (below) with a Lime Hawk which called for the night along with a Poplar one. Respect! Common and always sure to arrive in June, the BB joins yesterday's Peach Blossom in my Top Ten. Later on today, I am going to curl up with Prof Ford and his chapter on scale colouring in the famous Moths in Collins' New Naturalist series. I once had lunch with Prof Ford at the Travellers' Club; a witty old bachelor, his books are sans pareil (Butterflies in the NN series is the other one; he was down-to-earth when it came to titles). Incidentally, I'm delighted to see that the excellent covers of the books remain the same as the ones I got as a school prize in 1963 when I was nobbut 13.

Two crackers

Two lovely moths this morning; ever so common and regular as clockwork at this time of year, but you can't get blase about this sort of ravishing colour and patterning. The Peach Blossom, to the left in the pic above, is one of my top ten UK moths; it really does look like a fragment of a fruit tree in flower. In real, its background colour also seems greener which must be a trick played by the scales on the eye. I haven't got a picture of our apple tree in flower handy, but here's one of our rhododendrons in full blossoming glory in honour of the moth. One of Titania's other attendants, for sure.

The other arrival is the Buff Arches with its 'collar' ruff modelled on that of the Spanish ambassador to the court of Elizabeth I and the strange, almost manuscript patterns on its forewings. Come to think of it, the way they wrote by hand so beautifully in those days, its swirls are exactly what the Spanish ambassador might have appended to his signature, with a flourish, on despatches to Philip II of Spain about how necessary it was to send an armada.

Here are the moths larger, and if you click on them, they will go larger still. Wooo! It was an exceedingly good night for moths last night; the catch also included two Poplar Hawks and one Elephant Hawk plus a string of other riches which I will tell you about in due course. And now the sun is out again, although the forecast is not so good.

Glittering prize

I'm still in bed at the moment, having my tea and relishing the prospect of a lovely day. 'Uninterrupted sunshine,' says the BBC. Oh goody. I shall go and inspect the trap shortly, but for now here is the rest of my backlog, and a close-up of the wonderful, sudden patterning of a Beautiful Golden Y. The production of wing scales like this is a natural wonder; the reason for them, unknown.

Maybe it should be called the Golden Questionmark, like some sort of TV prize show, because the Y is nearly always broken in this fashion. It's a characterful-looking moth in every respect with its tufted back resembling the succession of little summits along Striding Edge. The ground colour is also a lovely mixture of different browns. It's common too in spite of its fine appearance, and we get frequent visits from its near namesake the Plain Golden Y, which is less of a Cinderella than it sounds (see posts passim, including this strangely-captioned one...)