Space Invader

Sorry for the blurry effect of going up close. There's nothing wrong with your eyes

Another rainy night but the opposite way round from Sunday with dry, old weather in the evening and a wet, mild morning. Hunkered down in one of my green eggboxes was a welcome visitor, the Satellite, one of the handful of UK moths which spend the winter as an adult.

It must be a lonely life for the gregarious specimens, with only December and Winter moths likely to be abroad in the really cold months. The fomer, incidentally, which starred here yesterday, is doubly hardy for it spends its first winter as an egg, hatches, munches and pupates in a leisurely way over Spring, Summer and Autumn, then emerges in its fur coat just in time for a second crack at the nastiest of our famously capricious weather.

I tend to think of the Satellite as the Space Invaders Moth because its alien spaceship markings remind me of that infuriatingly addictive computer game. Its companions in a sparsely-populated trap were a couple of Sprawlers, the one illustrated defying the rain on the outside of the plastic shield, a very fine Feathered Thorn, a completely comatose Chestnut - below - and the poor bedraggled chap at the end.

I rescued him or her from a pool of water which had dripped past the rainshield and he or she gamely crept on to my life raft, nipped from a piece of eggbox. It's supposed to clear up shortly and I'm hoping that supposition is correct.