Cocky Robin

My new Robin is a great improvement on the one which pestered me over the moth trap for the last two years. That was a rather battered bruiser with the nearest equivalent a bird can manage to a nasty look. This one is...well...here he is, above.

He's also better-mannered and doesn't attempt quite such reckless dives into the eggboxes as his predecessor, giving me time to inspect and photograph the visiting moths. I am well aware that most moths end up as bird or bat food and are a very important part of the animal food-chain in consequence, but I don't see a role for myself as an interfering human aiding this process.

The moths have been unspectacular since I last posted with the variation in the weather, including some cracking sunny days, not extending to the nights which have been cold.  Hevrew Characters are easily the most numerous guests, but I get half-a-dozen Small Quakers a night like the one above, lots of Common Quakers and and plenty of Clouded Drabs including the three below.

Looking back on 2024

I started this post back at the end of January and then got diverted. That is why it begins like this...

We don't have snow or icicles at the moment but there's a frost most nights and I think that the season qualifies as the very dead of winter, certainly in moth-hosting terms. Time for me to don my slippers, light the proverbial pipe and cosy up in front of the fire, pondering back on the year that's gone and its moths.

Well, we certainly don't have snow or icicles now, as the end of March approaches, but behind the lovely Spring weather as I type, there still lurks the threat of frost. We always cross out fingers tightly for our two magnolias and their many local counterparts, which are all coming beautifully into bloom.  One late frost can make those glorious blossoms look like loo paper.

So, looking back to 2024, in common with other recorders, both in this part of the world and nationally, I experienced a fall in numbers; not drastic but noticeable. However, the species list kept up nicely and I had six newcomers: the Brown-veined Wainscot, Buttoned Snout, Kent Black Arches (second picture above), Oak Nycteoline, White-marked and Jersey Tiger (top picture above) among the macros and Anania perlucidalis the sole novelty among the micros.

I would never have identified the Brown-veined Wainscot, immediately above, without the help of the Upper Thames Moths experts, to whom I paid tribute in my last post, nor the White-marked (just below) which falls fatally for me into the category generally entitles Very Similar Brownish Moths. 

I did manage to crack the curious Oak Nycteoline, though, (first moth below) which romantically made its debut here on the eve of St Valentine's Day. Finally among the macro-moths, the Buttoned Snout (second below) first joined me in the vegetable patch and then appeared in some numbers in our storage attic very late in the year.

The solitary new micro, meanwhile, may well have been here before but mistaken by your famously incompetent observer for a Mother of Pearl. Here it is, Anania perlucidalis whose attractive vernacular name is the Fenland Pearl. 

Not a bad line-up of new species. AND the Clifden Nonpareil came back again, in late August which is one of my earliest records for it.

On we go, plus a sad farewell

Four more moths new for the year have arrived: the Early Grey with its associations with flavoured tea, the Early Thorn in its highly distinctive resting pose and the micros Diurnea fagella, sometimes known romantically as the March Dagger, and Acleris literana (I think; although it may be kochiella; Ben Sale may adjudicate after his very welcome appearance in Comments on my last post). 

This moth can also be known as the Sprinkled Roughwing, another great name. I am whole-heartedly with the minority (of the generally very small number of people who are enthusiastic about micro-moths), who would like to spread their vernacular names. They are much too small to be encumbered by Linnaeus' strange mixture of Latin and Greek and it is very welcome that Wikipedia is using the English names as well. Anyway, Here they all are:

Early Grey, attended by a sinister Ichneumon Wasp

Early Thorn

Diurnea fagella or March Dagger

Acleris literana or Sprinkled Roughwing

Other visitors in the trap included the rich total of six Oak Beautys and I couldn't resist this composite photo of four of them:

Elsewhere in the moth enthusiasts' world, I am very sorry to pass on the news that the Upper Thames Moths blog has stopped on Blogger, after 12 years as a truly wonderful rod and staff for my faltering efforts at species identification. Upper Thames Moths' group is still going strong and the blog itself has moved to a new format on Facebook whither I may follow it although I'm not very keen on the format there.

Apparently, increasing numbers of its users have had issues with Blogger which fortunately haven't affected me here. So there we go; but I owe a huge debt of gratitude to all involved in its production, notably the infinitely tireless, patient and generous blogmaster Dave Wilton, appropriately a retired air traffic controller, whose own traps in Bucks attract a remarkable and thoroughly well-deserved number of moths.

He has been joined in the ranks of the UTM blog's unstintingly helpful people by a range of experts, some of them among the most knowledgable in the UK (Oxford University is on our doorstep) and this network has given me other great moments of pleasure, such as Martin Townsend's tip-off about the emergence of Death's Head hawkmoths from chrysalises found in nearby Kirtlington, which realised one of my life's ambitions - to see this wonderful beast.

Eek! One of the Kirtlington Death's Heads

The blog has also made it easy to track interesting phenomena such as the almost unbelievable realisation of another of my great hopes - for years set on one side as fantasy - of seeing a Clifden Nonpareil. I first clocked their arrival on the UTM blog and so was ready and waiting when they started turning up here.

Holy Grail - the first of more than 20 Clifden Nonpareils which have done me the honour of a visit

On the plus side, the end of the UTM blog coincides with great and welcome changes in the easiness of moth ID via the internet, notably my iPhone's introduction of its 'bugspotter' facility. Dave Wilton rightly warned me to be cautious about relying on this but it has proved reliable with macro-moths and saved me a great deal of annoyance and time. iRecord is another terrific asset.

I sometimes felt that the UTM blog spent too much time on ID and too little on discussions of moth behaviour and that it was always a pity that outsiders such as the wise and very experienced Ben Sale could not post there. But farewell UTM blog, old friend! I have appreciated you more than I can say.

The Season under way

Moths have begun to arrive in some numbers with the sudden and very welcome turn in the weather. A lovely warm afternoon yesterday was as good as Summer and the night before was the first without frost for a couple of weeks.

I walked past the light trap in the early evening after dark on a mission to cut some chives and it was already clear that the number of guests would be well up. In the morning there were happy families of March Moths, Common Quakers and Hebrew Characters plus the couple of early season stars shown below: a Nut-tree Tussock and an Oak Beauty, the latter with a Hebrew Character alongside. 

I lack the patience to count exactly how many there were of the three multiple arrivals, something which seriously reduces my value to science, but I would estimate that all of them numbered a dozen or more.  I didn't spend very long looking at the trap with the bulb lit because the light is so bright; but the flapping and jinking of new arrivals, some of them apparently struggling to escape once down the funnel, added to my conviction that light does not 'attract' moths in any benign way, but throws their nocturnal guidance systems into confusion. I have been reassured by experts that this process is unlikely to damage them and indeed they are all quiescent in the morning; but part of me still wonders.

The March moths, like some other species later in the year, are good at keeping out of the trap and content to perch on the bulbholder or transparent cowl. This might be thought to allay my worries about the effect of light but I think that cosiness may be playing a part. It is lovely and warm near the lighted bulb.

 

I am now up to ten species this year which is pretty standard for mid-March: the latest arrivals included the Chestnut, Small Quaker and Engrailed, above, and the Twin-spotted Quaker below, a very handsome member of a largely demure tribe.  I am making a great effort to send all my species to iRecord so that at least the UK moth database knows what's here, even if I let them down on the precise numbers involved. Mea culpa!

Punctuation class

                                  

Although my first six butterfly sightings of the year have all been Brimstones, the species is seeing serious competition for its traditional first place from the Comma. I have had a string of reports of these from other parts of Oxfordshire, over in Bristol and a cousin in Ripon, whose actual first butterfly sighting of 2025 was a Comma, the first time that this has happened in her garden. 

No mystery about the Comma's name...

My own example spent ages sunning itself here on the genuinely warm afternoon of Sunday 9th March but the weather has sadly got notably colder since then and I have seen no further butterflies at all. 

The moth trap has had its first mass arrival though, about 15 Hebrew Characters with their distinctive markings shaped like the Hebrew letter ‘nun’. This was supposedly affixed to the moth by God after it had the temerity to engage him in conversation, which apparently moths are not supposed to do. 

Keeping company with a Clouded Drab

Hebrew Character on Runcible spoon

Maybe it’s like meeting the monarch, something which happened to me a few times in my working life. I had to wait until she said something to me. That done, we had a couple of cosy chats. 

My other moths in the last week have been the Clouded Drab shown above, the T-shaped Common Plume below and finally  a Small Quaker. All common and to be expected but quite a nice variety in chilly times.

Oh, and I found this poor little relic of last year's trapping. What it is, or was, I am afraid I do not know.

Butterfly debut

Penny and I and a friend saw our first butterfly of the year yesterday, a very early Brimstone flying happily round in the sunshine which has been making the last week extremely delightful The nights are still frosty and by evening the garden gets really chilly. But from midday until teatime, the sun has actually been uninterrupted and hot.

We all agreed that seeing a Brimstone so early (last year's first wasn't until mid-March) meant good luck for at least a year and probably five. We'd just been to a seminar on mediaeval women at Wolfson College (yes, Oxford is good for the ageing brain) and our superstition seemed perfectly reasonable alongside many of theirs.

Actually, Googling such things suggests that if your first butterfly of the year is white, that means good luck, while a yellow one such as the Brimstone portends lots of sunny weather. I am happy with either belief, or consequence, but in my lifetime, the first butterfly I've seen has almost invariably been a Brimstone and indeed this is often said to be the source of the word 'butterfly' - the butter-coloured fly which is so closely associated with the coming of Spring.

One perhaps more interesting story which pops up when you research Brimsones is the famous fake example, shown above. This was brought to the English butterfly expert James Petiver in 1702 by one of his usually reliable contacts, a William Charlton who sadly died later that year. It was declared to be a new species by Linnaeus himself and named Papilio ecclipsis on account of the two sickle moons and recorded in the 12th edition of Systema Naturae in 1767.

The fake - a watercolour by another 18th century butterfly expert, William Jones

Nearly 30 years later, however, the great man's disciple Fabricius looked at the specimen and realised that it was a fake, a standard Brimstone with the black blotches, moons and other delicate markings painted on. It was clearly done very skilfully but the evidence does not survive; the keeper of Natural Curiosities at the British Museum where the insect was by now stored was so angry that he stamped the poor, flimsy little hoax into pieces.  

Two replicas were later created (one in my first pic) and may still be seen at the Linnaean Society in London, a nice acknowledgment that even the greatest of natural history classifiers could go wrong. Otherwise we have to be content with the normal Brimstone, which is very common but still exquisite butterfly, or the lovely Continental species Cleopatra which has vivid orange colouring on its forewings.

This butterfly excitement hasn't diverted me from moths; rather, it prompted me to put out the trap last night for the first time in weeks.  The frost came but so did a solitary visitor and an appropriate one: the March Moth shown here. My first moth of the year on the same day as my first butterfly! What has fate in store?

Proving a negative

Happy New Year belatedly and I hope that you had a lovely Christmas, quiet or fun-filled according to your preference. We've had a happy time with the grandchildren and plenty of peace and quiet in between. Lots of good long Winter walks and bike rides too.

We even managed to stir ourselves in the current very cold weather and were rewarded today by sights such as this display of 'Puddle Icicles', a beautiful little micro landscape caused by cars splashing water on to the verge from a puddle, on an otherwise unremarkable stretch of road.

The fields immediately around our house meanwhile look like this, below, cold as cold can be, very still and quiet and misty too. Not the ideal circumstances for moths nor indeed moth trappers. However, driving back from Worcester two nights ago, when the dashboard said that the temperature outside the car was -3.5 degrees, we saw a moth flutter in the headlights.

Ever the optimist, I was persuaded by this to light the lamp when we got home, keeping my fingers crossed that the intense cold wouldn't do something nasty to the mercury vapour lightbulb.  Here's the trap awaiting visitors. Did they arrive?

No, they did not. In the morning, the bulb was fine but the cowl had a thick rime of frost and the lawn all around was crunchy with thick ice.

The eggboxes were empty of all forms of life, not even the tiny flies which appear on almost every other day of the year.  I will have another go in a couple of days' time when the weather may have crept back up to nine or ten degrees during the day and well above freezing at night. Meanwhile, I am having a look back at the year and hoping to compare my rather unscientific results with the much better-organised ones of Dave Wilton and the other ever-helpful contributors to my rod and staff, the Upper Thames Moths blog.

All clear

There are endless advantages to having a hobby from the simple pleasure it gives to the more complex psychological needs which it no doubt fills. But one of the most practical is that it makes you a very easy person to buy presents for. When I was a boy, this might have been the sinister-sounding 'Get him a killing bottle' or a set of entomological pins; this year, my top present (from Penny needless to say) has been a new moth trap cowl.

This is the transparent collar which encircles the bowl of the trap and holds up the mercury vapour bulb and, as I have mentioned several times in posts, it is a long time since it was tramsparent. The ratio of masking tape to plastic had become almost unbearable and the remaining plastic was rubbed and scratched. Behold the difference, above, between this venerable but failing item and its glorious successor which I unwrapped on Christmas Day.  

I have put this out tonight for its debut after a brief interlude when we took the grandchildren to the local skatepark to try out their scooters and inline skates and found this delicate little lacewing on their car widow, speckled with droplets from the very thin mist which has hung around all day. I also had to dry out the eggboxes in front of the fire, a toasty position which they shared with some of the same grandchildren's drying laundry

Then it was time to peel off the shiny new collar's protective film and plug everything in. I can't wait until morning to see what, if anything, comes to take and an admiring look. Last night drew a visitor total of nil, after the delightful Three Wise Moths of Christmas night. It is still mild but very misty and we had a bonfire and some fireworks, so the odds are balanced.  Sleep well!