Limey and some odd friends

Today's 75th anniversary celebrations of VE Day recall a world of Yanks and Limeys, and appropriately a smart Lime Hawk moth turned up this morning, my second hawk species of the year after the run of Poplars on recent nights. It rested in the characteristic way of hawkmoths, with its plump body tightly up-curled, like someone portly attempting a yoga position.

Muslin moths still dominate the eggboxes and, again, I had a modestly unusual variant, after the very light one which came a couple of weeks ago. I did wonder whether this one had got its markings in some encounter with a plant or potential predator, partly because the squiggle in the third picture only seems to be on that side. But the main markings are neatly symmetrical and I think, from my not very sophisticated enlarging capabilities, that they are differently coloured scales.

The Treble Lines has started appearing and there were three last night, along with a Shuttle-shape Dart, with its finely-defined shuttle-eye markings, and two pugs, the first a newcomer for the year, the very pretty Foxglove Pug and the second a Common Pug (I am fairly sure).

As well as the moths, there was a rich assortment of other insect life in the trap, starting with this Mayfly, a delicate but rather sinister-looking creature which I initially mistook for the genuinely sinister Giant Ichneumon or Sabre Wasp whose grubs get inside living caterpillars and eat them alive, as in Alien. Yuk.  I put this theory on the ever excellent Upper Thames Moths blog, along with the Muslin moth, and its wonderfully helpful organiser Dave Wilton put me right.  Thanks as ever.

I was going to tell you more terrible things about this creature but instead I can lament the fate of so many Mayflies. On a sunny afternoon above a stream, I have watched them hatch, take their first clumsy and wobbly flight like some primitive aeroplane, and then be gobbled up by a watching bird, diving in like a jet fighter.

Talking of clumsy insects, my first Maybugs or Cockchafers arrived, five of them, and there was very funny black beetle whose only defence strategy was to try to bury his or her head in an eggbox crevice.

Finally a couple of caddis flies, a Daddy long-legs or Crane Fly and to end with, two 'ordinary' flies whose IDs I hope to establish from iRecord: