One of my favourite moths called last night for the first time this year: the Frosted Orange. Its colouring and pattern is wonderfully subtle and well-suited to its name; a mixture of the warmth of summer which is now beginning to give way to mellow autumn and chilly winter.
The Sallows are another signal of the changing seasons and share the orange which is a colour shared by summer and autumn. This cCentre-barred Sallow disdained the trap and chose to sleep instead on a metal window frame. It was a very conspicuous object to my human eye but not, apparently, to birds. It was still safely there this afternoon.
Finally, the second generation of Snouts are upon us, darker and smaller than their cousins who were here from June to early August. Pinocchio and Cyrano de Bergerac come to mind although the snout is actually the moth's palps, organs whose role involves touch and taste rather than smell.
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