June beauties, Part 1

The last few weeks have shown the abundance of moths here, none of them new but a rich procession which it is always a pleasure to record. One of the less frequent over the years has been the Cypress Carpet with its sharply-angled dark streaks. It has expanded rapidly in the UK after arriving in the record books as recently as 1984. 

The Muslin Footman is one of a number of delicately-patterned May and June moths whose slight blurring has always caught my attention as a particularly effective form of dazzle camouflage. It is one of a category known to me, if not the wider moth-ing world, as 'Laura Ashley Moths' because of their likeness to the floaty, pretty dresses which were happily popular in my courting days.  Here are three more: a Common White Wave, a Treble Brown-spot and, I think, a Lesser Cream Wave.

The Poplar Grey, below, is too chunky to be a Laura Ashley Moth but it has the same combination of black, grey and white making up a beautiful pattern on its wings.

Finally, here's an old favourite, the Barred Straw, demonstrating its wish to be a butterfly with its wings closed vertically above its back, followed by one of the many dragonflies which patrol our garden - in this case, I am pretty sure thanks to UK Dragonflies' excellent website, a female Common Darter. Darting is what indeed they do.

The Hop Dog

 The Pale Tussock is one of the characterful moths of late Spring and early Summer, especially the female with her woolly breeches and well-executed version of yoga's Swan Pose. Our grandchildren found the one above on their door this year. Two weeks later, on a visit here, they discovered a fine cocoon in our treehouse, tucked into the V of an old catapult, a souvenir which I brought back years ago from making a radio  programme in Hannibal, Missouri, the hometown of Samuel Clements, aka Mark Twain.

The slumbering moth was naturally Christened 'Mark Twain' and eight weeks later, he emerged; a nice male of the species. He was luckier than a second Pale Tussock which my granddaughter found late last year as a caterpillar. These are fine-looking creatures with tussocks of hair which account for the moth's name - and which also cause rashes in some people, leading to the nickname 'hop dog' in the Kentish hop fields where they were often found by pickers.

The bright colours led my granddaughter to call her caterpillar 'Neon'.  He or she chrysalised after spinning a cocoon but remained sleeping inside well after the hatching of Mark Twain. My granddaughter was concerned early one but I counselled patience. By late June, however, I agreed with her that something might have gone wrong and we took a careful look.  The cocoon was snugly tucked in a bug box lent by a patient schoolfriend who self-sacrificingly had been obliged to do without it all that time.

My granddaughter's premonition was sadly right. Inside the cocoon, along with the untransformed last stage of the caterpillar, were the smaller cases of ichneumon parasite wasps. They too seemed to have perished which was a sort of consolation.  After all, Charles Darwin himself said of the ichneumon: “I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidae with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of caterpillars.”  A sad lesson which our young scientist, who is no Creationist, thoughtfully took aboard.

Summer beauties

I promised in yesterday's post to bring you a bit more colour and here we are: some of the stars among moths which have arrived here since early May. One of my runaway favourites called, the Lilac Beauty - above and below with its curious folding of the forewings when at rest. I tried to entice it from the side of the black bowl which isn't brilliant for digital photography, but it skittered off.

The Blotched Emerald is another lovely moth in spite of its name as are the Clouded Silver, Burnished Brass and Green Oak Tortrix micro which follow it, below.

Here are a couple of portfolio pics of other little jewels: the day-flying Scarlet Tiger which I mentioned a couple of weeks back, The White Plume, a Barred Straw like one of those ropy Lysander aircraft the RAF used to drop spies in World War 2, a Blood-vein, the famous Peppered moth and a delightful Blue-bordered Carpet.

Then we have the specially graceful Beautiful China-mark micro, an Elephant Hawk, a Lackey, a Barred Yellow, a very lightly-patterned Buff Ermine, a Single(!)-dotted Wave, an ermine micro of some sort, a second, very battered Beautiful China-mark and a Green Carpet.

My slumbering Peacock butterfly chrysalises are meanwhile proving to be an excellent supply of more original presents than flowers or chocolate when visiting friends. The couple who invited us to lunch on Saturday also got a bonus of four Elephant Hawk moths which had come to the light trap the previous night. They are very docile in captivity and took several minutes to warm up their wings before scooting off into our friends' garden, a lovely spot with an interesting, pure white form of Rosebay Willowherb, the Elephant's favourite foodplant.

Catch-up; steady the Buffs (and Greys)

 

Before our expedition to the Peloponnese in late May, the moths had been coming here in good numbers and here is a little hark-back to those arrivals.  They were all predictable and none of them new to me - complete novelties are very rare after all these years but they do come from time to time. The finely-whiskered gent at the top if the Malvolio of UK moths, the Muslin, apparently a modest, grey species until you spot the fine yellow stocking tops.

The topside view of the moth is bottom left in the first composite pic below. The female, which seldom comes to light and never has yet to mine, is white. The micros in the top row are, I think and hope, Agnopterix arenella and Cochylis atracapitana and  the pretty moth on the bottom right is a male Pale Tussock.

Next we have the Muslin's prettier relative, the White Ermine, a common moth and also one which more people seem to see than is normally the case with moths. Over the years, I've had several dozen inquiries about them from people who've found them slumbering indoors, like hibernating Peacock or Small Tortoiseshell butterflies. On the right we have a Green Carpet, a very pretty little moth whose colour fades as it ages, and a Lesser Swallow Prominent.

The quartet below came earlier, at the end of April: a Brindled Beauty and a Pale Pinion and below them a Hebrew Character on the left and a male March moth, one of the Winter and Spring species whose females are flightless, poor things.

Sticking with the grey and buff swatch of moths, the next four are an Early Grey, a rather dark Hebrew Character, a Clouded Drab and two beyond my powers although I recognise my granddaughter's hand.

I'm not sure about the IDs of the next two either but...

...no prizes for me in getting this trio: the good old Poplar Hawk, always the first of the hawks but very late this year in arriving on 18 May, my birthday. Below on the left, the lovely Chinese Character with its distinctive resting position which, it has to be said, is thought by some moth camouflage experts to protect it from birds via the resemblance to a dropping. A very beautiful dropping nonetheless. And on the right a cockchafer or Maybug, bizarre creations which always make me smile.

So to the final instalment of grey; I will hope to bring you something more colourful in the next post.  The Nut-tree Tussock on the top left is accompanied by three micros: one which I cannot ID (top right), plus another Agnopterix arenella and a Twenty-plume.

Sticky socks

 

My official business here is moths but it's hard to resist the charms of butterflies at the moment. They are everywhere. So are the tenacious burrs of Goose Grass or Sticky Willie. Luckily I enjoy picking them out of my socks before falling asleep during the ten o-clock TV news. We have 25 species of butterfly on our two square mile patch - here's a cribsheet for locals which I made a year or two before the pandemic. Because it was Midsummer, I forgot the earlier-flying Orange-tip and we've since found Large Skippers and of course the Black Hairstreak described a couple of posts back.

My other butterfly adventure at the moment has been the breeding of a bundle of Peacock butterfly caterpillars which I found conveniently on a bed of nettles in our garden. The little caterpillars subsequently cleared much of the rest of the garden's wild fringe by munching through incredible amounts of nettle. I hardly dared go away because of the perils of missing their daily supply of leaves.

As per The Very Hungry Caterpillar, they soon became plump and the nettle consumption rate rocketed; I was even having to raid neighbours' gardens.

Wonderfully spikey, aren't they? And so are the chrysalises into which they metamorphosed after a month or so. The first to make this remarkable change tastefully chose the brightly coloured Sellotape which binds a muslin square to roof of my converted plastic storage box - my older son, whose daughter is as moth-minded as her Grandpa, calls it the 'mothodrome'.

I love the way that the caterpillars secure themselves and then dangle with their heads and upper bodies hooked up like question marks. This batch is now with the granddaughter while more are pupating here, ready for an invasion of great-nieces and nephews next weekend. I hope that everyone gets to see a final hatching into a butterfly, a magical experience which is widely available these days thanks to butterfly houses, and of course on the Internet and TV.

My daughter-in-law isn't keen on insects although the granddaughter is doing a brilliant, quiet job of winning her over. But I can't resist adding this picture of their clothes pegs, which seem to have taken the Peacock chrysalises as their model.

Back to the moths

Right. After the diversions of our Greek holiday and the Black Hairstreak discovery, it's time to return to the normal subject of this blog, my regular tally of visiting moths. There have been some lovely ones in the last few, warm nights; none new but a great variety and some beautiful species. I'm starting with the Scarlet Tiger, a regular visitor adding colour and fun to the daytime rather than the dark, because it flew unprompted into the house. 

Next, a lively pair of male Drinker moths - sexed because of their antennae and smaller size than the paler-coloured females whose caterpillars we used to breed at school. They were easy to find because they climbed long stems of grass in the cool of early evening to sip drops of dew; hence the species' name. These two were preparing to leave and I took this very short clip which shows the classic moth process of warming up the muscles enough for flight.

Finally, this photo includes one of my beautiful thumbs to give you an idea of the Drinker's considerable size. The one below gives scale by the different ploy of showing the moth trap's rainshield in the background, as well as a smaller, 'ordinary-sized' moth slumbering nearby. Plus those terrific antennae and a clearer view of the wing markings, like beads of spilt dew.

The Drinker is almost in the league of the hawk moths which have started to call here every night.Here is a trio of the lovely Eyed, the very familiar Poplar and the socking great Privet, the UK's third-largest moth. An Elephant arrived last week too, but I have seen so many in my mothing time that I lazily neglected to photograph it. Never mind, there will be plenty more.

Here's the Privet Hawk again, below, on a leaf of one of the many Paulownia tomentosa trees which we have grown from seed collected in London and Oxford. My final picture shows views of the wonderful collection of 12 mature Paulownias in the Sir Charles Clore courtyard of the Saïd Business School at Oxford, a hidden glory of the city. Paulownia leaves can grow so big that when a North Oxford primary school used one in a playlet about the Garden of Eden, it hid the whole of both Adam and Eve.

Tempted down from the treetops

In early July last year, our local butterfly recorder tipped me off that Black Hairstreaks had been seen in a classic 'butterfly field' a couple of miles from our house, a sunny patch of undisturbed meadow on the edge of dense woodland fringed by blackthorn, brambles and briars. I went and spent a happy morning encountering White Admirals among other butterfly glories and, at the very end of my ramble, found my prey on flowering brambles by a row of run-down garages. Like rare birds, elusive butterflies often find surprising places to tuck themselves away.

A more typical photo. Black Hairstreaks prefer the treetops where they lick up aphid honey, only making occasional forays down to briars and brambles from late morning

The site

A fortnight ago, the same recorder told me that the 'Black Hairstreak' season for this year had started and could I go and check out the field again for sightings, as she was busy with other demands on her life. I couldn't go immediately because Penny and I were preparing for, doing and recovering from a 20-mile walk in the current blazing sunshine for the charity World Child Cancer which the said cousin chairs. Friendly fate, however, had a treat in store. I took my cousin and her partner for a walk round the 'Big Field', right on our doorstep, and in a sunny woodland ride (second picture above), guess what we saw.

Same with added bike

I immediately interrupted our chatter with a schoolmasterly "Shush!" and "Don't move, just for a sec" as an unfamiliar butterfly, reminiscent of a Hedge Brown but smaller and definitely bigger than a Blue, flickered about on blackthorn with sudden, soaring sallies to some young ashes, way beyond my iPhone range. Then down it obligingly came and click!  We have a new Black Hairstreak site to add to the 60 or so on record, and it is almost in our garden.

There were two of them on this initial visit and the following day I called by on my bike coming home from Oxford and had ten sightings, sometimes just of one, sometimes of two, but never as close as the first encounter. The picture immediately above was the best I could do. I will keep an eye on them but I am sure, given the mount of blackthorn, briar and bramble we have around here, that there will be other local sites. Butterfly Conservation do well to describe the species as very elusive rather than very rare. There just aren't that many people who know what they are and are looking out for them.

Last year's sighting was followed by my first-ever encounter with a Brown Hairstreak and I described 2022 as an annus mirabilis as a result. I reckon that 2023 has also earned that status now, at least so far as hairstreaks are concerned.

There was also a happy coda to this adventure. I unwittingly lost one of my bike's propellors which must have got entangled in the scrub which the hairstreaks so much like. Luckily, the bike is well-known round here and some Good Samaritan found the prop and stuck it on our gatepost. So now, like a hairstreak, I can fly again.