An hour in the sun

 

In between the tennis (Hooray!) and the football (Oh well, next  time), I had an hour's gentle wander in the evening sun yesterday round the big field and neighbouring plantation just a short walk from our house. There were lots of butterflies astir and even more when I swished through the long grass of the generous unfarmed margins round the crop of oats.

I still find Marbled Whites a wonderful feature of life down here, after many years in Yorkshire where I came across them in large numbers only once, flying beside Chalkhill Blues amid the ghostly hummocks of Wharram Percy, perhaps the most thoroughly-studied, abandoned mediaeval village in the world. Their chessboard pattern is exquisite and they are usually generous in settling down long enough for me to take their photographs in focus. 

Here's another one with five neighbours also on the wing: a fresh Red Admiral, a Common Emerald hiding in the bushes, and a Crambus pelella micro doing the same, a Small Skipper of which there were myriads and a Meadow Brown, likewise. Meadow Browns are famously devoted to small territories and so when they scoot off at my approach, I am happy to wait for their inevitable return.

Back at home, I forgot to include an aptly-named seasonal moth which made its debut on Saturday night, Behold the July Highflyer. And here below, startled from some garden shrubs, is another Crambus/veneer micro whose ID I will try to sort out when I find time.

Bright day

Time for a spot of colour today, with the excitement of the Men's final at Wimbledon (Go Spain!) and the Euro Cup Final this evening (Go England!).  There is no more reliable moth to provide it than the Large Elephant Hawk which is coming in large numbers every night.

There were seven on Saturday morning, five of them shown here, and another five this morning. We are blessed with ample beds of willowherb round here, as indeed is most of the country which accounts for the large population of this fine moth.

Colour isn't the only register of beauty in moths, of course, and these little micros demonstrate the rival virtues of delicacy and graceful patterning, even though the first one is very worn. It's a Beautiful China-mark like the one I showed three posts ago but with the strongly contrasting brown and white very faded. Below it is a relative, Ananaia coronata, in a much fresher state.

Now is the high season for flimsy, fluttery and pale moths with very large numbers of the large Mother of Pearl micro,  Pleuroptya ruralis, beginning to appear. This species is noteworthy for its purply, opalescent sheen as shown on the pair below.

The Single-dotted wave is another example, below, as is the creamier Small Scallop which follows it and the wonderfully pure-looking Common White Wave.

Ditto the Muslin Footman which, hard though it is to believe, is a close relative both of the Scarce Footman which follows it below, and the spectacular Rosy Footman whose arrival in my granddaughter's trap I described two posts ago.

And now let's celebrate today with some jewelled moths - the good old Silver Y which was one of the first moths I ever saw. They fly by day as well as night and are often to be seen as a whirr of grey nectaring on brambles and darting too and fro.  Then we have both colourways of the Brown-line Bright-eye whose 'eye' is bright indeed. and lastly a Burnished Brass variety aurea with its central brown line wholly separating the two patches of gleaming golden green.  The way in which moth and butterfly wing scales use light to create these shining colours is one of Nature's marvels.

Moths can celebrate beauty too in the sheer complexity of their camouflage colours as with this Marbled Beauty crouching on our house wall a few inches above a Willow Beauty which is doing the same thing. I missed both of them in my preliminary scan of surfaces close to the light trap. 

Last in this procession is this Common Emerald whose faded colouring did not fare well against the dull black plastic of the trap's bowl where it was perched until it fluttered off to a bush where things improved.

And so to some butterflies: a Meadow Brown peeping down into our greenhouse (and thankfully staying out of its fierce temperatures which UK butterflies and moths cannot endure for long).

Then we have a trio from the lovely Trap Grounds nature reserve by the canal in central Oxford, a fascinating urban oasis where you are well-rewarded by wildlife of all kinds if you have the patience to sit and watch.  I also met a Ringlet, a Small White (deadly but lovely enemy of cabbage growers), severl Gatekeepers or Hedge Browns and to round off this post, a Two-banded Wasp hoverfly, Chrysotoxum bicinctum, the first to be recorded in the reserve although I suspect that they have just gone un-noticed. I only spotted this one because it photobombed my session with the Gatekeeper.

Oh and before I close, Comma butterflies are providing us with brilliant flashes of russet as they fly powerfully round the garden and a nearby path between a field of oats and a line of trees.  I wish that they were fritillaries but you can't have everything and we do well enough. 

Film Star

 

We are lucky in Oxfordshire to have a large and lively population of Scarlet Tiger moths, the ultimate UK proof that the tribe are not all small, brown and boring. Vividly coloured and happy to fly by day, the species is even a major contributor to tourism, not here but on the Greek island of Rhodes where the Valley of the Butterflies is actually the Vally of Scarlet Tiger Moths.

I usually get my first inquiries of the year about them in the shape of their caterpillars which hungrily munch comfrey and agrimony in neighbours' gardens, leaving skeletal leaves as shameless proof of their appetite. The adult moths are striking when at rest, as above, with white or cream spots daubed on a gleaming backdrop of oily blackish green. When they take wing, their scarlet underwings are glorious. 

This very short film clip gives the idea, I hope, complete with my 'Oooh!' and below are stills extracted from it. The moth is interesting too in having mouthparts sufficiently developed for it to take nectar in large quantities from flowers. Perhaps this accounts for the species' long Summer season, along with the effectiveness of its warning colouration as a deterrent to birds.

I have sometimes dismissed the next moth as just yet another Large Yellow Underwing which shows how resistant to learning I am after all my years running a light trap. In fact it is the beautifully marked and highly distinctive Broad-bordered Yellow Underwing. I wish that I could show you the said underwings, but the moths are so shy of showing them except in brief flashes during flight, that I would have to kill one first, and those days are long gone.

Next comes an everyday but beautifully-marked Common Wainscot, an example of Nature's delicate painting with only the most modest palette. And after that a quartet of recent arrivals: a Common Rustic, Common Plume, Elephant Hawk moth and a micro whose ID I hope to sort out over morning tea.

Some butterflies to finish with: a Comma, showing the reason for its name. It startled me by flying past and settling with its glowing russet topwings fully spread but snapped them shut as I crept up to it. The camouflage of a ragged leaf is most effective. Then a couple of Small Skippers which have just replaced the wave of their Large brethren in the big field near our house which has very generous 'wild' edges. 

And a frog, surprised on our patio from which he or she leapt rapidly in an impressive series of hops.

Rosy Posy

 

My granddaughter's light trap keeps coming up trumps, last night with this glorious Rosy Footman. It is a moth on the shrinking list of UK species which I want to see but as yet never have. We both knew at once that something special was in the dark cylinder of the trap because of its almost fluorescent glow.

By chance, we had been checking out one of the modest number of eggboxes which she can fit below the actinic lamp and I was identifying a Flame Shoulder. She was scornful of its entitlement to such a dramatic name and pointed out the contrast with the moth - below - with the small, shining arrival deeper down in the bowl.

"That's more what I'd call a Flame Moth," she said.  And I saw to my delight that a Rosy Footman had at last come to see me, albeit at the grandchildrens' home rather than Penny's and mine. I gingerly lowered my iPhone into the gloom of the black plastic cylinder and got some blurry images, showing the glow but very poor on the delicately-etched detail. 

So we decided on the high risk strategy of tempting the moth on to the granddaughter's slender and extremely careful fingers and thank goodness, this worked. It posed briefly before fluttering away but only got as far as, first, my wrinkly hand and then my entomological grandson's pyjamas. There it stayed for a helpfully long photo session before gracefully vanishing into the protective gloom of a bush.

The granddaughter proposed renaming the moth the Fiery Bridge and the grandson chipped in with the Flamebuster. Good suggestions both but I also like Rosy Footman, even though the moth has no resemblance to the majority of its relatives in the Footman family, with their neat grey and yellow uniforms which reminded England's 18th century moth-namers of flunkeys in stately homes. Whichever name you choose, not forgetting Linnaeus' Miltochrista miniata, it is an interesting moth, mostly found in Southern coastal areas where its caterpillars feed on dog lichen.

It is described officially as 'locally common' but I get the impression that sightings are a bit rarer than that. The excellent UK Moths website, for example, uses a photo of one in the Dordogne in France in its series of pictures.

A Privet Hawk moth also paid a visit to the granddaughter's trap where she memorably found three on a single night a week ago. And there was a very good variety of other moths which I'm adding further down below in a quartet of composite photos.

First we have four quite small Riband Waves which were all outside the trap, sheltering in nooks and crannies on the house.

And then a very nice Miller moth, which the grandson promptly renamed the Hang-glider - a good alternative, I feel, because of its shape and the small black markings - a Dark Arches, a Buff-tip and a very worn Brimstone.

Thirdly we have this trio: a Willow Beauty on one of the house windows, a Bright-line Brown-eye and a Fan-foot.

And finally a Common Rustic with well-defined markings, a Garden Carpet, rather dull on an overcast morning, a Spindle Ermine and to round things off rather appropriately, a Common Footman in the sober uniform referred to above.   Neat enough but what a contrast to its delicious relative at the head of this post!