Bring on the Robots

This isn't the most exciting time of year for the moth enthusiast to say the least, but there has been one extremely interesting development in my own small world. For reasons of age and technological incomprehension, I have been slow to update the system on my iPhone and therefore have only just started using its wonderful animal-identifying facility which brings up this handy little icon when you photograph a butterfly, moth or other bug.

I'd got used to using the 'phone's plant identifier which worked the same system with a little icon of a flower, but was amazed and jealous when my sons showed me the ladybird one and I couldn't access it on my 'phone. This led to the long overdue upgrade and now I can. And it is a real help with my perennial challenge of how to identify the 'brown and boring' types of UK moth.

Here's an example from this morning when a drizzly night produced a typically meagre catch with only Red-green Carpets standing out amid the tired old Large Yellow Underwings, a battered Lunar Underwing and some Daddy Long-legs. There was one other moth, below, which I suspected of being a Red-line Quaker but wasn't sure. The auto-bug identifyer on the 'phone confirmed my guess.

As with all Artificial Intelligence, the system is only as good as the data fed into it and there is always room for improvement, which I am sure is going on. I asked the experts on the Upper Thames Moths blog what they thought and you can enjoy their answers here  Clearly, caution is needed with a robot which can mistake a moth (admittedly a rare one) for a lizard! But as Dave Wilton, the blogmaster at UTM suggests, the important thing is to recognise the limitations.

I sent the composites of recent moths below to the UTM blog with the iPhone's suggestions which were: Willow Beauty, Willow Beauty (underwing), Lunar Underwing, Straw Underwing/Clouded Drab (though I was sure that this was a Deep-brown Dart, Double Square-spot, Archips podana, White-point, Square-spot Rustic and another Lunar Underwing.  Then in the second batch, Pale Mottled Willow, Lesser Yellow Underwing, Square-spot Rustic and a third Lunar Underwing.

The AI made two bad errors in the first composite; I was right about Deep-brown Dart and the Double Square-spot was an Autumnal Rustic, a very familiar moth which even I can ID. But the overall score was not bad and I would have had trouble on my own with Pale Mottled Willow and several of the others. 

I did a final check when news broke on UTM of a rare arrival called Porter's Rustic which I certainly wouldn't have known if it had landed here. The robot couldn't make sense of the first two pictures from the UTM blog below, but included Porter's in its three suggestions for the final - and much clearer - photo.  So in general, hurray!

Here are a couple of today's Red-green Carpets as an escape from brown and dulldom, one with its perky tail in the air which must be as much of a 'Come and Get Me!' as it looks:

Here's a shy Black Rustic, too, a species which hasn't been abundant this year, plus two looks at a sadly dead Lunar Underwing which show a little more bodily detail than is usually possible with a live one:

Good news meanwhile from the magazine Wizz! Pop! Bang! which describes itself as the Awesome Science Magazine for Kids and has instructions in the current issue on making your own moth trap. This is very commendable but I wouldn't suggest it myself in late October when the chances of disappointment are high. They ran it as part of a Hallowe'eny focus on the dark and night-time. Still, it's getting a little warmer, so here's hoping for any awesome science kid who has a go.

A more profitable exercise in entomology over the coming half-term might be searching the cabbage patch for Large and Small White caterpillars. I have no time for these myself, but anything bug-like and a little out of the usual is always exciting for a child to find.

Now here's a puzzle for you. Follow these pictures slowly through to find out which insect we are looking at and where it has perched. No cheating...

Look carefully...

Aha! Got the insect. But the background?

A bit sculptural?

Indeed! The bust of Churchill at Blenheim Palace was nice and warm in the sunshine and attracted one of the many Red Admirals we've enjoyed this year. In spite of media headlines, it's not been at all bad for butterflies and here is a recent Brimstone in such good condition that it must be a third or even fourth generation of the butterfly which first appeared in our garden in early April.

And finally... A couple of insecty references in other and unrelated parts of the world and a lovely Morning Glory and blackberries which welcomed us home from Italy.

Italian excursion

 

The day after my last post, we headed off to Italy and a wonderful week in Bologna, Ravenna and Ferrara. I wasn't especially in search of moths but I kept an eye out and soon realised that a familiar species was wreaking as much havoc on Italian gardens as it is in the UK on box hedges in gardens such as those of the National Trust.  A few minutes after seeing the devastated lines of box at the Palazzo Costabili in Ferrara, I spotted a black and white flutter and tracked an adult Box moth to its refuge in a large bush - shown below.

                                               

You can see from this aerial Google view below how much the Palazzo has to lose, although there are nicer and more interesting hedges than box in my view. I showed my picture to the staff at the museum's reception and they nodded gloomily. They knew all about the moth but like their counterparts in the UK where the moth arrived accidentally from south east Asia in 2007 and has since made itself thoroughly at home, there is little that they could do. Rooting out and replanting with a different hedging plant is the likely option.

My only new moth during the week was this cream and brown, jittery character in the next picture which was dodging about between scrubby flowers in the car park at Commachio, a minute version of Venice where the restaurants specialise in eels. It's a Geometrician, a species only twice recorded in the UK, in 1903 and 1990, a curious combination for me as the first was 47 years before I was born and the second in the year during which I turned 40. It gets its name from its 'looper' caterpillar which has no middle legs and thus appears to be measuring its journey as it repeatedly advances with its forelegs and then hoicks its hindlegs after them.

I also spotted this below, which had the look of a Grizzled Skipper but was too nervous to give anything more than this blurred photo. I've had a look at my European butterflies Bible and initially wondered if it might be some sort of Grizzled Skipper; but I think that it is more likely to be an Italian version of the day-flying Latticed Heath moth.

   

That spot was in the countryside near Pieve di Cento where I also found these pretty Common Blues, a Common Darter dragonfly and a scarecrow which warded none of the above or their larvae off

Finally, away from the insects, here's a Wall Lizard appropriately on the ancient walls of Ferrara, a hungry slug in Ravenna and a Blue Crab with only one big claw at Commachio, an invasive species which can lay eight million eggs in one brood. Eeek!

Quiet times

There's supposed to be a warmer spell this coming week but so far hopes of an Indian Summer in the UK have gone the way of the rest of a below-average season all round. Wet and cold is how I will remember 2024 although we have had some stunning short periods of real warmth and the occasional brilliant day. Yesterday was one of them.

The clear sunny sky meant a cold night to follow, however, and the trap was thinly populated this morning. The best arrival was the very fresh Dark Marbled Carpet shown in my first picture, resting happily on the outside of the cowl. 

My other main moth in the last few days has been the Angle Shades, one of the species most commonly sent to me for ID because they seem easily-disturbed by day. This happened to me on a bike ride earlier this week when I brushed a hedge and an Angle Shades whizzed out before skulking back into the shadows - pic below.

Two days later, I was cycling along again when I noticed the moth's unmistakable fighter-plane shape on the tarmac just ahead. I managed to stop and gently lifted it on my finger to the safety of a bush. It had been raining gently and you can see the large raindrop illustrating the effectiveness of the waterproofing of the moth's wings.

Cousins on holiday in Spain have meanwhile had a more exciting time, thanks to their vigilant spotting of another triangular shape on a workaday litter bin. Can you see it in the top pic below? Move down, if not. The spotters are part of a great family network on WhatsApp called Insect Chat which is impressively successful at interesting a new generation in entomology and indeed wildlife of all kinds.

This is a Convolvulus Hawk, one of Europe's largest moths and a rarity in the UK.  By chance, my only encounter with one was at the wedding in Cornwall of another cousin from the same side of the family as the Spanish I-Spy team.  You can read more if you'd like to, here.

Beware of the Elephants

Some good friends set me the challenge above which is handy at this time of the year when caterpillars are wandering around looking for somewhere to chrysalise. I knew the answer because my acquaintanceship with this appealing creature goes back to my early teens when the head of natural history at Leeds Museum, a lovely man called John Armitage, encouraged me and my brother to go and search for them at the end of the Summer holidays.

It's an Elephant Hawk moth cattie and its colour is the sign that it is ready to tuck itself away in a cocoon. The caterpillars are green for almost all their lives, turning olivey-brown and then grey only at the very end. 

This is when they look like elephants' trunks - well, if you half-shut your eyes and open your imagination - and accounts for the name of the moth which often puzzles people. The adult insect is a beautiful pink and lime green and bears no resemblance to an elephant except for those mythical pink ones.

Elephants are loved by all and feature in some of our best children's stories including The Elephant and the Bad Baby which was written by an excellent woman, Elfrida Vipont, who was a prominent Quaker and wrote completely different books about the Quaker way of life. Mind you, The Elephant and the Bad Baby has a very gentle moral point, sugared by the fact that the Bad Baby is a most appealing character.

One of its fans was my granddaughter, now a great entomologist, who sent me the picture below of a Brimstone Moth at Birmingham airport railway station, with a quiz for Granny and myself about what the full sign said. (Granny won with 'Customer Services'). The granddaughter got into quite a conversation with the station staff who said that a lot of Brimstone moths came to their lights and reflective signs at night. So there's a curious piece of species data.

Another young friend, whose topknot can just be seen at the bottom of the next picture, kindly sent me this spot from the canal. She knows that we have had narrowboats pass through with the names of every single member of our family, remote cousins included. And now we have a moth. 

The trap is fairly routine at the moment, but that is not to denigrate the arrivals, including bright little micros such as this Pyrausta purpuralis, a slightly less common relative of the familiar Mint Moth, Pyrausta aurata, which often flickers around near our herbs.

There's also a good number of moths every night and overcrowding in the cones is commonplace - here we have an Angle Shades with its umbrella-style wing-folding visible on the left, a Large Yellow Underwing lurking at the back, a Rosy Rustic and a little ermine micro at the front.

Next we have that fine creature, a Common Marbled Carpet, really quite a size bigger than most otrher carpet moths, and finally a Gothic, very well-named with its patterning so like the spars of an ancient church window.