Singing the Blues

I must have spent hours in the course of my life stalking Holly Blue butterflies in the hope that they will open their wings while at rest and reveal the beautiful blue of the upper sides. At last it has happened - appropriately on P's birthday and even more happily, thanks to her spotting this obliging, beautiful example.

 

It's not such a good photo but I'm including the second picture because it shows the butterfly going to the max; a Heavenly sight for which I am extremely grateful. My third and fourth pictures show this graceful little creature as you usually see it - and there is nothing second-class about the lovely chalky blue of its underwings. It's just that they are very, very familiar.

It is also remarkably widespread; we have plenty here as we did in Leeds and I regularly saw them when the grandchildren were in very urban Walthamstow as I also do now that they are in Bradford-on-Avon where the two pictures above were taken last week.  So was the one below, which shows a Holly Blue's shadow on the leaf it has chosen as a hiding place. If you see a little blue scrap darting about in your garden, I reckon that it's most likely to be a Holly Blue.

Less happily, I am finding the Box moth all over the place as are other moth enthusiasts. It's also a rather beautiful insect but not if you own a box hedge. The caterpillars are voracious to a degree.

All manner of moths are visiting at the moment and here's a small selection. The first picture going left to right by row shows the micro Syndemis musculana (I think), Pebble Prominent, Smoky Wainscot, Common Rustic, Pale Prominent, Least Carpet, Angle Shades, the pretty micro Anania coronata and another micro which I have yet to ID.  The second has the micro Donacaula forficella, a very worn Lackey, a Marbled Coronet, the micro Pammene regiana, an unknown Carpet-ty type moth,  Treble Lines, Common Swift, Light Emerald in its fresh green glory which sadly fades, and finally a Blood-vein.

One or two others. First a Common footman and the spindlier Scarce Footman for comparison, and then finally a composite of a Yellowtail, Waved Umber,  Ringed China-mark micro very unusually showing its lovely underwings, Latticed Heath (which links to pretend to be a butterfly), Canary-shouldered Thorn and something teeny which, again, I have yet to ID. All suggestions for this and other one above, are most welcome.

Miniature marvels

Continuing with the theme of fingers from my last post, Emily is going through a spell of yellow nails which add a certain zip to the moths which she much enjoys hosting on each hand. Actually, the first on the top left is one of the many Peacock butterflies which she has hatched from caterpillars, followed by three examples of the battering which moths get from their flying adventures - two raggedy Swallowtails and a very worn Lackey. Then we have the jewel-like micros Acleris holmiana and Acleris forsskaleana, a Willow Beauty, and the micros Chrystoteuchia culmella, Syncopacma larseniella and Aethes rubigana. What ponderous names for tiny scraps!

In the moths-on-fingers department, the beautiful Elephant Hawk is keeping up its visits here as strongly as the Poplar Hawk and is if anything more attractive to young visitors. Not just on hands either - see below.

This Poplar Hawk's perch took me back to 2011 when Emily's Mum and Dad took us to see the famous Monarch butterfly migration in Mexico and one of the majestic insects plumped for a similar resting place on my daughter-in-law's head.

Youngest brother meanwhile hosted another Poplar Hawk before letting it go and sun itself on a nearby wall.

 

Other regular beauties keep arriving meanwhile and here are some of them: one of the Thorns; I am useless at distinguishing between them, a Smoky Wainscot, a Heart and Dart, an opalescent Mother-of-Pearl, a Marbled Green, a Blood-vein, a Dun-bar, a Silver Y and a locally common Lunar-spotted Pinion.

Far from home

In one of those coincidences which are actually not random, two friends have separately sent me pictures of Jersey Tiger moths, one in a garden in built-up Walthamstow and the other in what its finder aptly describes as 'the rather brutal surroundings of Reading station car park'. The moth strayed North in the early 1990s from the Channel Islands where it has long been common and has since flourished in the South of England with - and I may proudly quote from the Moth Bible - 'occasional records elsewhere north to Leeds (one in 2008)'.  

We lived in Leeds then and have a photo of a Jersey Tiger outside our greenhouse, taken not long before ID-ing another one spotted by my younger sister on holiday in Lyme Regis.  We also saw masses by a waterfall on holiday in Turkey 20 years ago; the species is the one which forms a famous spectacle in season at the 'Valley of the Butterflies' in Rhodes.

The best I have seen, though, were at Kardamyli at the top of the Mani peninsular in the Peloponnese. They kindly allowed me to photograph their even more spectacular underwings which glowed orange in the bright sunshine of Greece.

One of my correspondents was startled that his find was a moth not a butterfly, understandably because like the more common Scarlet Tiger, the Cinnabar and the Burnet moths, Jersey Tigers are both brightly-coloured and day-flying. But somehow, I cannot see the Greek tourist authorities acknowledging their mistake as graciously as he did. There would be less interest, sadly, in a Valley of the Moths.

                                       

I've often featured the Yellowtail but can't resist posting more pictures of it, partly because the shenanigans of chasing or tickling it into showing the reason for its name are so enjoyable. This one led me and a friend who was very keen to see the tail from one perch to the next. Finally, above and below, it gave us a glimpse.

Here it is at rest in its usual pose, below, hiding the yellow but with the small brown smudges which distinguish it from the similar White Satin. While we're in the white and yellow part of the spectrum, here's one my top favourite flowers in the garden, a giant, floppy fried egg of a Romneya poppy, complete with worshipping hoverflies. Update: very many thanks to Conehead in Comments below for revealing to me that these are Marmalade Hoverflies. I never knew that such delightfully-named creatures existed.

Then take a look at the sulphurous yellow of this Brimstone, with the tiny specs of glorious orange on each wing. I was lucky to get a photo of the topwings though the reason was more melancholy, the poor butterfly had either been hit by a car or crash-landed because of the slipstream. It was on the tarmac right at the edge of the road as I biked past, still alive and feebly moving but very battered.

Here are a couple of Brimstones in the garden recently, showing their inevitable resting position with the wings tightly furled and the resemblance to a leaf remarkable.

I can't resist adding the two other primary colours in the form of flowers - chicory or Ragged Sailors, or Corn Dog or many other things, which is another of my top ten, and the glorious poppies which are everywhere round here for an awful lot of the Summer.

Finally, some other small neighbours. The Soldier Beetles are running wild with lust on our nettles and hogweed, a curiously portly little wasp has been buzzing around Update: thanks to Conehead in comments again, this is actually a 'Batman' Hoverfly, nick-named on account of its thorax emblem; its official name is Myathropa florea; then a great-niece found this pupa tucked neatly into a drystone wall, a Lacewing and a Small Red-eyed Demoiselle (No - Final update from the inexhaustibly knowledgable Conehead: this is actually a White-legged Damselfly as in C's comment below) vie for delicacy and I've even included a humble fly because of its perch on Elfrida, the calm stone goddess who oversees our garden.

Keep away, I'm toxic

                           

The Cinnabar moth is one of the pleasures of Summer, outsmarted as a bright day-flying moth only by the Scarlet and Jersey Tigers. Its red and very dark green colouring is delightful and an interesting contrast to the yellow and black banding of its caterpillars. All stages of its life-cycle are poisonous to birds and the warning colouration is effective at keeping the moth safe. The black and yellow has also been adopted by the nuclear industry as a simple Danger code in a field traditionally dominated by red.

My daughter-in-law filmed another defence mechanism of the caterpillar - it can move extremely fast!  It is famously found on Ragwort, a lovely wildflower unjustly persecuted by the less tolerant among horse- and other animal-owners. Luckily, there is no way that efforts to suppress this vigorous plant will succeed. 

My daughter-in-law has been impressively active elsewhere in the moth field - 'impressively' because she has always had major hesitations about insects in general which our granddaughter, a terrific moth enthusiast as regular readers will know, has worked patiently and gently to ease. Here's a very nice picture of a Small Mapgpie micro taken by the d-i-l for instance. It would illustrate nicely the theory that moths' navigation is steered by a desire to reach the Moon (represented in the picture by the reflection of their Paper Moon lightshade).

She's also just sent this picture of a Marbled Beauty found in their house. What a beautiful, marvellously-patterned visitor, often passed un-noticed while sleeping on lichen which it so much resembles - mimicry camouflage, the opposite of the Cinnabar's warning colouration but equally effective as a defence.

Emily's flawless fingertips for scale are poignant for me because for the first time since 1978, I've just broken a pinkie. I diverted from the canal towpath on a mega-long walk home from Banbury to photograph the interesting treehouse below. As I made my way back, one of those big Chinook helicopters came whoop-whooping overhead and I looked up at the very moment my left foot slipped on mud and down I clumsily went. Ouch!  I hoped that it was only sprained and marched on for the six hours it took to get home, but no, it's a break.  At least I get loads of sympathy because it shows, unlike the nasty invisible sciatica which from time to time plagues poor P.

Here's a Then and Now of my two pinkie crises - the first was an addendum to a broken leg when I was knocked off my motorbike, fortunately almost right outside Bart's hospital in London. I got a nice lot of compensation with the finger adding extra because the other driver's lawyer accepted that fingers were important for journalists.

The injury hasn't interrupted moth activities, I'm glad to say. We had friends here yesterday who were keen to inspect the moth trap and here's my own set of battered but still beautiful fingers showing off a Barred Yellow before handing over a Poplar Hawk - one of the main 'all-Summer-long' species I which am grateful to get here.

June beauties, Part 2

 

The Pine Hawk moth is the latest of the Summer's big beasts to arrive in the light trap, the finest of the hawks in terms of aerodynamics with its jet-shaped wings. I'm expecting to see a Hummingbird hawk one of these sunny days too and perhaps the much rarer Broad-bordered Bee hawk which paid me a visit three Summers back. I write 'sunny' but we're currently in a spell of relentless (and actually not unwelcome) rain.

A second source of pleasure - and fun for the grandchildren - is the Yellowtail whose name seems mysterious until you tickle it gently and - bingo - its bright yellow tail curves up between its wings.

Mine came in the company of an unusually fresh Swallowtail moth, one of the relatively few seen by plenty of people because they ghost about outside lighted windows on Summer nights. Most of the many which come here have wing damage; they seem to lead adventurous lives.

Here's a Common - but uncommonly beautiful - Emerald in equally fresh condition. Within a week or two, that lovely colour will fade. And a Small Magpie, one of the biggest of the UK's micromoths and delightfully-patterned.

What riches the trap contains in June! Below, we have a Barred Yellow, a Large Yellow Underwing, a Foxglove Pug - a macro moth although smaller than the Small Magpie just mentioned - a Beautiful Hooktip, a 'Pinocchio' Snout and a Buff-tip, the moth which pretends convincingly to be a broken twig or cigar butt.

Leaving the best until last, the exquisite Peach Blossom is one of the moths I love most. I still remember finding my first by daylight in the six square feet of soil with a deliciously-scented rose bush and some nasturtiums which was 'my' garden at school between the ages of seven and 13.  I'm very pleased that my entomological granddaughter is a busy member of the Gardening Club at her primary school and her younger brother has just signed up too. They know far more about the subject, Nature more widely and the ecological challenges facing the world than I did.

Penny and I were baby-sitting the youngest brother last week and during a break, I did a little insect hunt in their garden and came up with these: Meadow Brown, Comma, Red Admiral, Large White, Lacewing, Brimstone, Silver Y, and 20-Plume micro, the last actually in the bathroom. 

The children also brought home this tiny caterpillar from school and together we discovered the ladybird and weevil - I think - on rhubarb and a tiny cricket on the smallest boy's arm. The weevil flashed a pair of red knickers when we disturbed it and it flew off.