Halting hummer

 

This is the first time in all my 73 years that I have seen a Hummingbird Hawk moth at rest, other than a couple of specimens which have come into the greenhouse, unknown to me, and expired.

The moth is one of the busiest of its kind, for ever hovering over clumps of lavender and other scented Summer plants, a daylight flyer and therefore often seen, usually to understandable wonderment. "Is that a humming bird?" I've been asked a dozen or more times. And indeed, although small enough, the moth is bigger than some of the smallest humming birds.

This one was nectaring in the standard, fascinating manner in the grandchildren's garden. Alerted by my wandering past, it nipped up into this large shrub and perched there, out of reach of a decently-focussed photograph but close enough for the above.  I was then distracted by the jewel-like flutterings of a group of amorous Common Blue butterflies including the obligingly posing male below. What lovely creations they are!

In the world of moths meanwhile, I am currently being visited by Snouts galore, large numbers of boring (to me, sorry, I just cannot get the hang of ID-ing them) brown and grey types like this Flounced Rustic, and also the much cheerier Orange Swift, below that.

Equally welcome, Light Emeralds have emerged in large numbers along with the sinister-looking Box moth, whose voracious caterpillars are genuinely sinister to owners of box hedges, including the National Trust which looks after miles of them. 

My star, though, is this Old Lady, below, a venerable-looking dame with a fine turn of speed once disturbed. I watched a large moth like this fluttering high above the trap last night, soon after I had turned it on, but the rival glories of the Blue Supermoon kept whatever it was safely up high and the catch this morning was standard for the time of the year.

A mixed bag

 

How encouraging that we live in a world where young enthusiasts for moths and butterflies, or indeed other insects, can clad themselves in clothes which Linnaeus might well have envied. And how nice that my light trap provided a couple of fine Poplar Hawk moths this week for a couple of friends who had heard of my strange entomological goings-on and came to have lunch and a look.

Less happily, the Large, Small and Green-veined White butterflies which are currently floating about like small handkerchiefs have shown their less appealing side by laying eggs on our purple sprouting.  Here's the result which I am afraid I am dealing with ruthlessly. We lost the whole of last year's crop to severe frosts and I am determined to salvage this years.

Other butterflies have been absorbing me on walks round the big field near our house, and there are cheerful signs that next year's population is going to flourish. Here's a Brown Argus caught during an interval in a mating dance with a friend (second pic), followed by two Small Skippers which were up to the same tricks.

And just for good measure, here's a contented and very beautiful male Common Blue whose mating perhaps took place earlier in the day.

My morning checks on the moths are watched closely at the moment by this robin, whose appearance on Instagram received 'likes' from both the American and the Iranian croquet associations. This got me wondering wistfully if the world's problems could be sorted out over croquet but the game is so competitive that I doubt it. My granny, who was a saintly woman in all other respects, was utterly ruthless when she had a mallet in her hand.

Here are some recent moths - from the top, reading left to right: Satin Wave (I think), Green Carpet, Spectacle, Anania Coronata micro, Common Plume micro, Straw Underwing, a pair of Grey Daggers, another Common Plume and a Pebble Prominent.

And in the second composite: Iron Prominent, Brimstone, Willow Beauty, female Small Scallop, Endotricha flammealis micro, Dark-barred Twin-spot Carpet, Garden Pebble micro, European Corn-borer micro and Small Waved Umber. 

Finally, a couple of dragonflies, the top one a Small Red Damselfly I think and the second one - which I saw near Exmouth - possibly a female Black Darter. Update: See Conehead in Comments who, helpfully as ever, suggests that they are actually Ruddy Darter dragonflies, the top one female and the bottom one probably male but my camera angle is not good enough to be certain.  Many thanks as always.

Spider's prey

It was my great-niece Connie who spotted it - a Red Admiral strangely poised in mid-air, like a kestrel but without its wings moving. Upside-down as well. We crept up, looked more closely and saw what we had feared: it had been trapped by a spider in a large but scarcely visible web.

It appeared to be dead but when I swiped the air nearby, it twitched feebly and then began to struggle. I circled my hand around it and it came free but still attached to pieces of the spider's silk. Down it went but its flapping wings freed it in time to avoid a crash and it escaped a little drunkenly into the safety of some shrubs.

Connie was duly hailed as the Butterfly Saviour but it was a handy lesson for the children, and for all of us there, about the ruthless side of Nature. Most people are naturally kind to animals and rightly so but animals have no reason to be kind to one another and seldom are.

In the moth trap meanwhile, I have had my first visit from one of my Top Moths, the beautiful Black Arches with its bold dazzle camouflage upper wings and a pink-striped body which is normally hidden from sight.  This one obligingly perched on the roughly transparent trap-cowl so you can make out the pink through the age-battered plastic.

The only downside to this beautiful creature for me is its dull and inappropriate name, especially in the world of moths where naming has been taken to inspired lengths. The Americans, however, call it the Nun Moth and you can find sites online asking questions such as 'Which is the bug that looks like a nun?'  I can't say that it resembles any nuns that I have seen or met, but at least the idea is more interesting that yet another Arches moth, alongside the Light and ubiquitous Dark.

A more serious downside for those who are not simply beguiled by moths is that the species is seen as a threat to hardwood trees, like the Gypsy Moth featured in my last post. The Americans in particular are worried by this; the awful prospect of an invasion of tree-munching nuns.

Travelling moth

 

Ten years ago, it would have been a big surprise to open the light trap and find the guest shown above. But the Gypsy Moth has staged a dramatic comeback since just before the pandemic, when the trickle of some 30 records since the 1950s began to turn into a flood.

I saw my first example at the grandchildren's home in east London in August 2019 when my keenly entomological granddaughter came rushing out to ask me what it was. A year later, two of them came on the same night to the trap here. I haven't seen any since then but plenty of other people have, across the South of England. News has spread as rapidly, because the Gypsy's caterpillars are a serious threat to many trees and are on the  world list of Top 100 invasive pests. Quite a distinction.

However voracious, the moth is an interesting species with the female only very seldom seen to fly in spite of her having larger and more beautiful white and creamy wings than the male shown here. He gets the terrific antennae instead. There used to be a distinct British sub-species in the Fens but draining and tree clearance led to its extinction with the last one recorded in 1907.  When a colony sprang up in Redbridge, north London, in 1995, it was eradicated by pest controllers. 

Moths such as the Redbridge ones and my visitors are described in Home Office terms as 'immigrants', 'former residents' and 'adventive', the last a term meaning having a toehold but not fully at home. Yet. The way things are going, we will be seeing more and more Gypsies, just as the very destructive Box Moth is clearly here to stay. One last distinction: its tiny caterpillars have a few meals of tree leaves then climb as high as they can and dangle, allowing themselves to be caught by the wind and sometimes blown as far as half-a-mile. An ingenious example of dispersal. 

A head as good as the Gypsy's belongs to the Canary-shouldered Thorn which is coming to the trap in some numbers at the moment and is extremely well-named. I first photo-ed this one at 7.15am before tucking the eggboxes away in our shed, out of reach of the robin. At 5.30pm, it was still around and sound asleep so I took it out on a leaf into the garden for a photoshoot closer to Nature.

Another recent moth which hung about for a whole day and night was the Lesser Swallow Prominent below which I first photographed at 8.15am. 

I was then distracted by other things and it wasn't until the next morning that I went back to the trap, which I had left outside, by which time there had been quite heavy rain.  Guess who was there? the same moth, sound asleep in spite of water drops covering its back like large beads.

More soon on other delightful visitors but to conclude for today, here's a composite of pictures taken during a couple of hours' gardening in the sunshine.  It shows, going across top to bottom, a familiar Peacock butterfly, a Small Skipper, a female Common Blue, a Brimstone, a Mint Moth, a very battered Silver Y moth, a Small White butterfly, a Shaded Broad-bar moth and a Large White. Happy times!

What a surprise

 

I have had plenty of excellent moth surprises since we moved from Leeds in 2013 and I re-lit the lamp to shine just north of Oxford. New hawk moths, abundant middle-range species and the glorious arrival of the Clifden Nonpareil. But I never expected the same thing to happen in the very much smaller world of UK butterflies.

There are only 59 species of these compared to over 3,500 types of moth. Yet this year has seen two completely new arrivals in our garden and immediately around. I mentioned my discovery of the very elusive Black Hairstreak back in mid-June; now its delightful cousin the Brown Hairstreak has come to visit us for the first time. 

I was patrolling the edge of our lawn on a lovely sunny day two weeks ago to take a photographic record of the butterflies and day-flying moths. I found Speckled Woods in a well-shaded corner and then moved on into the sunlight by the main flower border where the likes of Meadow Browns and Hedge Browns often flutter around.

My eye was caught by one of them which I took to be a Hedge Brown until the last minute. As I pressed the iPhone camera button, I realised that it was something else; a little smaller and more brightly orange. The moment took me back to a year ago when I saw my first-ever Brown Hairstreak in the car park of the Premier Inn at Newhaven, just as we arrived back on foot from the Dieppe ferry after a week in France. That one was so vividly russet-orange that I mistook it at first for a Comma.

I told our local hairstreak expert about the latest arrival and he was interested that, like the Newhaven one, it was truanting from its usual habitat of hedgerows and ash trees. Interestingly too, it appears to be drinking dew from the Day Lily's petals, rather than nectaring on the stamen. Given hairstreaks' fondness for aphid honey, perhaps it had found a watered-down variant of this favourite tipple.

The other exotic day-flyer much in evidence at the moment is the Jersey Tiger which seems to be rampant in the South of England now. We played Spot-the-Tiger with my grandchildren and a larger version of the photo above, which shows the back of their car. Below is the moth's more appropriate refuge after our game had scared it off up into some bushes.

I mentioned the other day that this is the insect which congregates in vast numbers in the mis-named Valley of the Butterflies on Rhodes - which seems to have been spared the wildfires, thank goodness. Here is a picture from an online visitor's log of just one small part of the valley's horde.

The last time we were down at the grandchildren's in Wiltshire, I saw another one fluttering about an outside light and then yet another in a nearby bush.  We have just spent the weekend in Topsham near Exeter at a family gathering and, lo and behold, what should be sharing our B&B but the Jersey Tiger in the third picture.

Here below are the results of another afternoon's meander with the iPhone, this time in the grandchildren's garden. And below that is one of their dragonflies, a White-legged Damselfly, kindly identified by Conehead in the previous Jersey Tiger post, which is always to be found on the same small unmown patch of their lawn.

In the moth trap, numbers remain high but arrivals are predictable and I have had no newcomers for some time. Below we have a Dark-barred Twin-spot Carpet, I think, and a Dusky Sallow followed by the hedge-munching but rather handsome Box Moth, a good old Elephant Hawk, one of the Summer's stayers and around since May, a Silver Y embracing a Common Footman watched by a micro-moth to which I will return for ID at some stage, and finally the excellent front breeches of a Ruby Tiger.

Now the lady's turn

After the glory of a male Holly Blue with open wings, described in the last post, I've now been lucky enough to find a female of the species which was willing to offer me a similar if smaller glimpse. Here she is, with the soft greyish-blue shading on the outer wing, as I waited patiently by a hedge in north Oxford, murmuring explanations to curious passers-by in an undertone which luckily didn't send her skittering off elsewhere. 

Hope I haven't overdone the pictures but it is such a treat to find a Holly Blue prepared to show more than the lovely, but very common, view of the chalky underwings. Here they are below, when the butterfly moved to examine the hedge's flowers after a thorough inspection of - I imagine - aphid and other small insect traces on the leaves.

The weather has been up and down this month but that hasn't stopped me lighting the trap now and then, and I have a much more handsome robin in attendance this year. I was never very found of its regular relation in past years, which looked like a bruiser and veteran of fights with other males. This one has a lovely ruff in addition to the famous redbreast.

I wanted an interesting moth to come on my younger son's birthday and the Yellowtail below obliged me. It isn't rare but this one posed in a very satisfactory way even if the yellow which gives it its name is completely obscured.

Other visitors recently have included the Scalloped Oak below, a very pretty Least Carpet, both forms of Riband Wave - a shaded ribbon and a clear one - lots of modestly opalesque Mother of Pearls and a nice combination of another, paler Least Carpet and a Lime-speck Pug, the last known to me from its excellent mimicry camouflage as the Bird Poo Moth.