Ultrasonic ace

The wind has veered to East North East turning the weather colder and the moths have sensibly decided to stay at home. After the abundance of Brindled Beauties in the trap last week, there was just one, joined by a lonesome Hebrew Character and this Frosted Green with its bunny 'ears', actually tufts whose purpose may be to do with successful camouflage.

In the warmer temperature of our house, however, Penny the Ace Indoor Moth Spotter has scored again - and above is a rare photograph of both her and her latest find. This is an example of the curious Bee Moth which takes its name from the fact that its caterpillars are often found in bees', wasps' and even hornets' nests where they dine on fragments of the delicate casing, wax, honey and even bee grubs if they find them unguarded. Yuk!

It is a very distinctive moth with its jagged pattern, shown above both with and without flash.  The picture below shows its much more familiar resting position like a little spearhead. The other notable feature of this small creature with which we share our large plant is that when mating, it supplements the common device of pheromone release - usually from the female but in this case from both her and the male - with sending ultrasonic love signals by whirring its wings. They can travel up to half-a-metre.

 

Rites of Spring

Spring has sprung and how lovely it is! After all these years, I still get a kick from seeing my first Orange Tips and Holly Blues.  I've not yet had time to stalk one of the latter in the hope that it may give a rare display of its vivid topwings rather than holding them closed, though the powder-blue undersides are delightful too. But here's a nicely co-operative Orange Tip for you, first from above as it draws the last nectar from the ageing daffy, and then delicate underside on a Milkmaid - the species' favourite flower - below.

Meanwhile, I've never seen so many Brindled Beauties in the trap as arrived last night - 32 of them, some looking extremely fresh, others the worse for wear and the one above still sound asleep, interestingly with its bushy antennae still out. I thought initially that it might be dead, but no. With them were another pair of obliging posers, a Swallow Prominent and a Pebble Prominent, left and right in the first picture below; and a Nut-tree Tussock in the second.

Oak Beauties continue to arrive too and I celebrated my first Brimstone moth brightening up the black walls of the bowl - and hooray that my new iPhone 13+ can keep its focus against that background. The student who borrowed my trap had a Brimstone in one of his catches a couple of nights ago and there will be plenty more to come. 

Finally, here's an absolutely exquisite little Yellow-barred Brindle, one of the first of the year's two generations here in Southern England, with the second due in August and September. You can just see the reason for its name threading through the predominant olivey-green. In a few weeks, that lovely fresh colour will have faded and the whole moth will turn a drabber, dull yellow.

Colourful crew

 

Some lovely moths are coming now that the weather is getting warmer, including a fabulous Bank Holiday with sunshine from Friday morning to Monday night. I have added Holly Blues and Orange-tips to my growing list of butterflies. Brimstones, Peacocks, Small Tortoiseshells, Commas, Speckled Woods and Green-veined White abound and it will not be too long before we have Marbled Whites on the edge of the big field next door.  Meanwhile, welcome to the Waved Umber neatly clinging to the rim of the trap's bowl above.

The Swallow Prominent has jetted in too while below we have one of the dreary brown triangles which I can never identify and a much more interesting-looking and in this case particularly well-patterned Powdered Quaker. Update: Whoops! Senior moment. As Pembrokeshire Birds kindly points out in Comments (below), this is a Dotted Chestnut, a much more interesting moth. Sorry!

Next a composite of thumbnail-sized pugs, Brindled mostly I think with one Double-striped down in the bottom right-hand corner. There may be a couple of Oak-trees in there too. I'm sorry to give up in despair.

Much more to my liking is the Fristed Green shown below, a handsome and blessedly distinctive moth which it's a pleasure to welcome. And my final composite shows a selection of excellent moths found by the visiting student on his first night using the trap about five miles away on the edge of Oxford. I particularly envy his Chocolate-tip with its unmistakable shape and Easter name. He also very generously gave Penny and myself a very large Easter egg when he brought the trap back before heading off to university. His Brimstone moth adds Easter chick cheer to the colourway of the catch and there's also a Brindle Beauty, a Shuttle-shape Dart, a Hebrew Character (the most common moth in my trap at the moment) and what I am pretty sure is a Flame Carpet. His next stop for trapping is Kenya where the moths will be fabulous.

Livening up

 

The Nut-tree Tussock is a neat and nicely-patterned moth with cappuccino colours and a distinctive shape. I had one in the trap's eggboxes and a second one, above, on a nearby fencepost where it was obvious to the human eye but fortunately not to birds. I was glad to see it and to have quite an interesting catch for April because the student I mentioned in two posts was coming to inspect proceedings and borrow the trap for a few days.

When he arrived, we cajoled the Tussock out of its sleep and watched it go through several minutes of warming-up, showing its TV receptor antennae in the process - a feature only of the male, which as in the case of most moth species, is much more likely to come to light than the female. I assume that this is because they are out and about on predictable business while the females stay at home, preserving their energy for the males' return.

What I thought was a pug, one of my least favourite species for ID purposes, turned out to be pretty little Twenty-plume moth - which I see is now sometimes renamed the Many-plumed, a better choice because as I have often remarked, it has six plumes, or sections, on each wing as the second, Greek part of its scientific name says - Alucita hexadactyla.  Six doesn't sound as good, however, and 24-plume is a bit over-precise, perhaps, so I am not really complaining.

A couple of excellent odd-shapes followed, the Pale Prominent above and the Common Plume below, the first a striking example of leaf-debris camouflage and second with the T-shape common to all plumes except the Twenty one.

It was also good to have a Satellite  with its highly distinctive markings, so similar to the little alien spacecraft in the old handheld computer game Space Invaders. Below that is another very well-marked micro and one dear to my heart because my record of it in 2015 was the first in Oxfordshire. It's Elachista apicipunctella and you can read more about it here.

Finally, a handsome Early Grey enabled me to make my usual quip about tea - one of my tips for a happy life is to mix two teaspooonfuls of Earl Grey with two of any ordinary tealeaves when you make a pot - or swap teabags if you're out in a café.  It makes for an extremely nice brew.

Catching up

 

Now that I'm under way at last, I ought to catch up with one or two entomological adventures earlier in the year. The butterflies have been out for a while now; the Brimstone (above) is very often the first round here, leading to the theory that the word 'butterfly' itself comes from this butter-coloured fly. I remember researching some ancient documents about 17th century lepidopterists in which butterflies and moths were always called just 'flies', so perhaps there is truth in it. Whatever, it is an attractive word, just like so many of its counterparts in other languages - farfalla in Italian, papillon in French, mariposa in Spanish and schmetterling in German. 

I've now got a reasonable tally of other species; overwintering Peacocks and Small Tortoiseshells have been around for a month and I saw the fresh Comma below on a very long circular walk from Oxford via Wytham wood, Farmoor reservoir, Cumnor Hill and South Hinksey. The Speckled Wood has emerged locally and yesterday I met my first Holly Blue of the year in the garden.

Now is also the time of the year for the Bee Fly, a harmless but menacing-looking creature with a long proboscis which looks unnervingly like a sting but isn't one. Their ability to hover, shared with the excellently-named Hairy-footed Flower Bee, is their main distinction, accompanied by a quiet hum. The zip about me in the garden, apparently curious but keeping their distance. They are only bad news if you are one of the insect species on whom their larvae live as parasites, gradually eating their host alive. The  mother bee has a unique spur in her ovipositor which enables her to eject a string of eggs around the home of a likely parent like a carpet-bombing warplane.

The one above, which I found dead in the Fives court during my weekly game, is a Dark-edged Bee Fly, much the most common kind. At home, I meanwhile found this little chap on our garden table. Is it a weevil of some kind?  Help appreciated.

The moths are coming on stream too, including the lovely Oak Beauty below, with its very fine antennae.  The Common Quakers and Hebrew Characters are more run-of-the-mill but showier colleagues are going to be arriving very soon.

Back at last

Hello again World! My prolonged rest from trapping may be ending at last, if forecasts of warmer weather turn out to be true. Life has been busy as ever and even the tireless commander of the Upper Thames Moths blog, Dave Wilton, has skipped the odd icy night recently. But I have a visitor tomorrow who has got the lucky chance of going on an ecological survey in Kenya and would like to see how the trap works. So I thought I had better do a dry run.

The results are above: nothing spectacular but it's nice to see a well-marked Pale Pinion, bottom right, which will have overwintered after hatching in the Autumn.  The others, clockwise from top left, are a March moth which has got its months messed up as happens with all UK moths named after the calendar, a Brindled Beauty in its beautiful fur coat, a Brindled Pug wearing its similar but smaller raiment and a Hebrew Character - the last the most common moth in the eggboxes.

I did run the trap a month or so ago and got Brindled Beauties and Hebrew Character then too. But there are reports of Emperor moths on the wing locally and we won't have long to wait before things get more exciting.