Seeing a ghost

1.30pm pic

8am pic

I woke to the drip-drip of half-hearted rain and also the realisation that, although I put the trap out last night, Penny has gone to the Lakes for the family's annual Women's Walking Weekend and the camera has gone with her.

But up stepped my iPad Mini, a very welcome present from my dear departed Guardian colleagues, and so I can bring you the picture above of a fine-looking female Ghost Moth. It's not as good as the regular camera but pretty amazing how close these little tablet computers can get. Update: my first photo was actually a bit dark, so I just went out at 1.30pm to where I'd hidden the moth and it was still there. So we had another brief picture sesh before the rain came down again, and the pic at the top is the result.

For all their glamour, in matters of love the females Ghosts are the pursuers rather than the pursued. The males, which are white and more spectral, adopt a strange, swaying flight at dusk, each like a pendulum over a particular spot, while releasing a scent reminiscent of goat. My Moth Bible continues in one of its most lyrical passages:

This attracts the female which sometimes flies directly at the male and both fall to the ground. Mating pairs are conspicuous on low vegetation by torchlight.

Goodness. I attach a pic from the famous Oberon/Olivier Wuthering Heights in tribute. My moth was in a deep sleep but what she had been up to before, I cannot tell.

There were plenty of other, excellent things in the eggboxes which I'll check up on and describe later, but here below is one of them: our old friend, a Poplar Hawkmoth, looking like something out of Tolkien - beware, that small green elf or hobbit which you can see in the top left-hand corner. (Actually, there's no need. It's a Green Carpet and moths don't eat one another).

Since I spent the last two days in Manchester and Salford, I'll finish with a photographic souvenir of the rainy cities, although I saw no moths nor butterflies. I was at MediaCityUK, where the BBC runs its completely excellent northern operation (new press complaints body, please follow suit), and coincided with the start of a rally of powerful sports cars.

Alas for this one, which conked out. The sign on the AA van said something impressive like Special Operations Technical Team, the motoring world's equivalent of my brilliant experts whose comments on posts put me right on the identity of moths.