Early but also late

Another frost last night and the moths remain sparse. Coming south has not led to a sudden abundance in the trap. There was a welcome 'first' for 2013, however, albeit a very late one: this Early Grey, a species whose name has led to much jesting on my part in the past about tea. By one of those coincidences which intrigued Arthur Koestler, Penny and I had a pot of mixed tea at Annie's Tearoom yesterday afternoon and the nice lady serving us called it 'Early Grey' in her soft Oxfordshire voice.

Well concealed in sunshine...

There's a general consensus that everything is late this year because of the long and dreary winter, and this is another scrap of evidence for that. What camouflage, though! I wonder if Early Greys have a very high survival rate from predators. By another coincidence, I have just been reading about an exotic camouflage of painted jungle animals which was used to disguise the otherwise shining white of marquees in a Friends' Ambulance Unit hospital at Dunkirk during the First World War - 'to shield them from the artless Hun', as it says in its quaintly dated terms.

...and in shade (Yes, I have discovered how to do captions)