Sense, Sensibility - and a Caterpillar

 My current project, given the worsening weather and darker mornings which limit the moth trap's appeal, is trying to identify the humble caterpillar which gloriously opens the new film version of Sense and Sensibility. It is a high honour for a humble creature and one made all the better by the amount of comment which it has prompted, such as this intro from a piece in the Economist.

The little scene illustrates the wild, impulsive and curious nature of Marianne Dashwood's 'sensibility' as opposed to her sister Elinor's sound 'sense'. In days gone by, the girl would more likely have been shown delighting in a rabbit's bobtail or a soaring hawk. Hooray that caterpillars are having their day in the sunshine! The task now is to find out, in the current absence of an online clip which actually shows the little chap, what he or she is. 

And it's only a few months since a Box-tree Moth, dreaded destroyer of neat hedges, made an anachronistic appearance in another Jane Austen film, as noted by eagle-eyed fellow-moth enthusiast Dave Morris here.  Meanwhile, I have a humbler domestic ID task with these two caterpillars below, which I rescued from a puddle in our rain-soaked garden.

I've sent a guess to iRecord which has a useful system of suggesting something more likely. In due course, I may get an expert ID but if not, it will not be the end of the world. Telling this sort of caterpillar apart is a terrible way of passing the time.  Ditto with the very worn moth below, and with worn adults generally. Their markings can fade and their wings get torn with a thoroughness which can ultimately make certainty impossible. 

I am 99 percent sure that this is a Sallow and my unfailing expert Dave Wilton on Upper Thames Moths concurs; but I feature it just because of the marvellous range of suggestions from the Bug ID on my iPhone. I do not really like to poke fun at this facility because it has often been a tremendous help. But perhaps it is good to highlight the limitations of AI at a time when the typically OTT world of journalism and social media is convinced that the robots are going to wipe us out. 

So here's the list.  All wrong, some wildly so: Dun-bar, Orange Swift, Acanalonia bivittata, the two-striped planthopper, Corn earworm (US-speak), Canary-shouldered Thorn, Forest semilooper (endemic to NZ), White-speck and Twin-spotted Quaker. Fiddlesticks!

Turning to other arrivals: Behold a Silver Y, a Chestnut, a Turnip, a Feathered Thorn, a couple of Autumnal/November/Winter moths and a Centre-barred Sallow, the last bringing a scrap of cheerful colour as the year winds down. 

Pieces of Eight

                               

We have a curious structure in our garden which may one day be famous. Called Fort Hansard, it stands on what is probably the highest-point in our low-lying hamlet and the reason for that is also the origin of its name. My father Richard was a Liberal MP in an era when members were given bound copies of Hansard, the Parliamentary record, and we inherited a veritable shed-load of these handsome books which no-one in the world seemed to want. 

We tried pubs, schools and secondhand bookshops, gave some to family and friends and kept others which included some of the speeches he made, but in the end, we decided to bury the remainder and crown the resulting hillock with a wooden, US Cavalry-style fort. There are an awful lot of subterranean books under the ethereal-looking structure below and our secret hope is that one day archaeologists will stumble upon them and debate why the UK Parliament appears to have met on the outer edge of Oxford between 1966 and 1987.

The reason for telling you this, is that for the first time in our 13 years here, I put the moth trap inside Fort Hansard and its eerie glow, as shown below, brought me yet another wholly new moth, the Figure of Eight above. 

I recognised something wholly unfamiliar when I first clocked it, clinging to the side of an eggbox as shown below. My iPhone's Bug ID came up with the manifestly wrong suggestion of an Oak Beauty, which looks very different and does not fly at this time of the year. But some good, old-fashioned work with the Moth Bible came up trumps and I have, most unexpectedly, notched up my eighth entirely new macro-moth this year.

Here are some further photos which perhaps show the reason for its name more clearly. Meanwhile my pleasure is increased by the interest shown on Upper Thames Moths, albeit for unexpected reasons. The group's tireless expert Dave Wilton commented on the Facebook page:  "Surprising when you consider how much blackthorn you've got close by." This is true, and accounts for the marvellous presence of Black Hairstreak butterflies here. Dave goes on to say that although the Figure of Eight is supposedly a species in serious decline, the Upper Thames is one of its hotspots. He says: "I've trapped three local woods over the past week and it was by far the most numerous moth, with more than 100 coming to light in each location." 

More than 100! And I've had just one...  Well here's some more of it, though I restrained myself from taking a hundred pictures:

A couple of other Upper Thames trappers joined the discussion, each with a solitary arrival like me. Anyway, it's most welcome and joins my much more frequent guest the Figure of 80, below showing (slightly faintly) the reason for its name, a moth which is unrelated except through nomenclature.

The trap has meanwhile remained busy in spite of markedly colder nights. Here are some current regulars, left to right in each line: Cypress Carpet, Satellite, Green-brindled Crescent, Lesser Yellow Underwing, Lunar Underwing, White-spot, Autumnal Rustic, Large Wainscot and Feathered Thorn.

And then: Pale Mottled Willow, Black Rustic, Winter/Autumnal, Red-green Carpet, Rosy Rustic, Autumnal/November, Large Yellow Underwing, Merveille du Jour and Sallow. 

Marvellous Movements

Another four Merveille du Jours have started a new life in North Oxford after a friend expressed an interest. I had sent him a photo of my Clifden Nonpareil and his brother-in-law countered with a Merveille from his own moth trap down in Kent. The transfer went well, with my eggbox moth-ferry heavily cushioned by my mac in the bike's panniers.

I'm interested that the top moth in the picture above of two of my quartet has a slightly tawny tone to the delicious green. I haven't noticed any variation in the species previously and the Moth Bible suggests that when variation does occur, it's usually a more dramatic matter of black blotches. Perhaps the hint of brown is like the pink from hotter weather during pupation, as discussed with the Vestal in previous posts.

It's a very different matter with another moth which is around in large numbers at the moment, the beautiful Green-brindled Crescent with its metallic scales. I hadn't had its brown variation,  form cappucino, until last night, although it's very well-known and has been common enough here in recent years. Here it is above left, next to the standard moth.

While we're on the subject of colour variations, this very grey White-point (as opposed to the usual brown) came last night, while new for my year was the Yellow-line Quaker below (not rare; I probably just hadn't noticed any predecessors). It is followed by a couple of handsome, fresh Rustics, Autumnal and Square-spot, a Shuttle-shape Dart and a Brick, a name which always reminds me of my mother's generation, to whom 'bricks' were helpful good sorts.

To conclude: here are some further examples of the cultural spread of moths at our local Sainsbury's: a very pricy ready-made cocktail has joined the Halloween decorations which I featured here last week and am planning to distribute to our wider family's horde of children, not to so much terrify as to further enthusiasm for moths.

Antenna envy. And anti-freeze

I have never wanted to be a moth although I may perhaps come back as one. If so, I very much hope that I will be a species with antennae as large and beautiful as those on this Feathered Thorn. They are the one really enviable attribute of a moth for humans, just as we almost all wish that we could fly like a bird. (Not like a moth, whose aviation is mostly jittery and violent with none of the swooping grace and majesty of large butterflies or the delicate grace of smaller ones).

The arrival of this distinctively triangular and foxy species betokens the approach of Winter although our current weather continues to be almost Summery. The colour is meanwhile Autumnal, excellent camouflage as the trees begin to turn in their annual glory of red, green, yellow and brown.

Here below is the moth from below, perching on the inside of my light trap's transparent cowl. Both the colour and the eponymous feathered antennae mean that this is a male. The females are bigger but duller and with simple antennae like threads.

My talk of the seasons is a good introduction of two species which require dissection of the genitalia (yuk!) to tell them apart. Im glad that my iPhone nonetheless goes ahead boldly and tells me that the first is a Winter and the second a November Moth.

There are three other species in this Very Hard To Tell Apart group, the Pale November, the Autumnal and the Pale Autumnal.  An interesting feature which they share is that their equivalent of blood contains elements similar to those found in ant-freeze which enable them to fly in cold temperature, sometimes after the prolonged period of heavy choking and warming-up which was a feature of cars in my youth.  

Super-Blue - unparalleled and storming into its eighth year

I don't spend a lot of time speculating about un-knowable things, but I am pretty sure that there is a Moth God, or Gods, with a set-up run along the lines of the immortal Olympians in Ancient Greece. Their speciality was teasing mere mortals and turning their assumptions on their head. So it is with me, whenever I make some prediction or other on this blog.

It's all very benign because my assumptions generally involve the season coming to a close and the prospect of shutting up shop as the darker mornings make checking the catch in my light trap less practical. Thus in my last post, I included an aside about the wonderful Clifden Nonpareil, my favourite moth of all,  failing to visit me this year after an almost annual appearance since its stunning return from effective extinction brought me my first in 2019.

So to this morning, and roughly halfway through examining the trap, I turned over an eggbox and - bingo! There was the unmistakably vast triangular form of a Nonpareil, which then co-operated helpfully when I tickled for further pictures to reveal its glorious blue-banded underwings and pastel duck-egg blue underside.

  

You can read a précis of the Nonpareil story here on my ecstatic blogpost back in September 2019 when my first arrived, following a gradual procession of reports of others further South. My latest brings my total in eight years to 18 - and this a moth which for 69 years of my life, I never had any hope of seeing. 

The actual dates of my Clifdens are 17 Sept 2019, 3 Sept 2020 (2), 4 Sept 2020, 5 Sept 2020, 10 Sept 2020, 15 Sept 2020 (2), 18 Sept 2020, 21 Sept 2020, 2 Oct 2020, 21 Sept 2021(3) and 5 Sept 2022. None in 2023 when I was on holiday for some of the Nonpareil season and did little trapping for other reasons including a broken mercury vapour bulb. Then one came on 29 Aug 2024, two last year on 7 Aug and 28 September, and now this one on 12 Oct - much the latest in the series and expanding the Nonpareil 'window' to nearly a week over two months.

Here is another photo emphasising the size of the moth by showing it alongside a dozing Sallow, a pretty standard medium-size UK species. In surface area, the Nonpareil comes close to the two great hawkmoths, the Convolvulus and the Death's Head. Here below, you can see its underside and a rear view:

If I had never caught any other moth in my trap, my cup would overflow with this.

Starting a Family the Merveille Way

 

I've been chirping away happily about the Merveille du Jour recently, the beautiful regular visitor to my moth trap at the tail-end of the season. Now here is a double treat: two Merveilles doing what comes naturally to moths and all other forms of life, including us.

I'm sorry to invade their privacy but it was a welcome sight as I had earlier decided to carry out a second distribution of the species to less favoured parts of our area, prompted by the arrival of four Merveilles in one night.

Here they are settling down comfortably in another of my moth ferries, which I slipped gently into one of my bike panniers for the half-hour ride to Summertown. They looked sleepy but two of them definitely were not. Behold what I found when Penny and I met our friend in a café for the handover:

A good sign, I hope, for a project partly triggered by a post from a fellow recorder on the Upper Thames Moths Facebook page (the same excellent source which put me on to the Pale-lemon Sallow in my last post) who has just moved from central Oxford to the rural suburb of Boar's Hill.  After a life without Merveilles du Jour, he has been visited by one straight away in the trap at his new home.  

Given that we have a positive glut of the lovely things in my garden, I thought that I would make a start on putting that right so that others in more central parts of the city would get a chance to see the moth too. I hope that this is acceptable to one and all; the introduction of 'new' species can be controversial and make some experts cross, as in the notorious case of an introduced colony of the continental mainland Map Butterfly in Gloucestershire in the early 20th century. A leading collector wiped it out, to equal anger from other entomologists who supported the project. 

Such small tempests benefit no one; and anyway my efforts involve just a few miles and little change in habitat, with plenty of the Merveille's favourite oak and ivy in the travellers' new home.  Meanwhile my visitors also gave me the chance of photoing the species'  underside, as one of them was particularly sleepy and obligingly rolled over when I gently tipped its eggbox. 

Now a change to a different colourway: yellow. The two moths below look as different as an omelette and scrambled egg but are actually the same. Each is a Sallow, the principal member of a small family whose brightness always cheers the Autumn here - and which has recently given me great excitement through the spread of the previously rare Pale-lemon Sallow exulted-over in my last post.

The extent of the Sallow's orangey-brown patterning is extremely varied for no known reason and the plain one in my first picture has been given the honour of its own sub-name: form flavescens meaning 'turning yellow' in Latin.

Another yellow favourite is still making occasional visits, the Swallow-tailed Moth below, which is followed by two shots of my most common visitor from the Sallows, the Barred, which also comes in several different forms.

Then we have a nice surprise: a Vapourer with its Hallowe'en 'eyes' and a name derived from the invisible trails of pheromone scent which the wingless female emits, much like her human counterparts graced by the products of Chanel and the like. I was ambushed long ago by one of the Vapourer's very fine, colourful and tussocky caterpillars while building our tree house.

And here's another yellow moth, but one which determinedly hides the vivid yellowy-orange bands on its underwings except when in flight: the Least Yellow Underwing.

Lastly, a boring-looking visitor in the Wax moth, whose dull appearance hides an interesting relationship with bees. Oh, and a joyful note from a national moth Facebook page that the Clifden Nonpareil's extraordinary comeback from virtual extinction has now reached Northumberland!  I haven't seen one this year, but it's fine by me if they've ll gone tearing off to the lovely North.