Bright day

Time for a spot of colour today, with the excitement of the Men's final at Wimbledon (Go Spain!) and the Euro Cup Final this evening (Go England!).  There is no more reliable moth to provide it than the Large Elephant Hawk which is coming in large numbers every night.

There were seven on Saturday morning, five of them shown here, and another five this morning. We are blessed with ample beds of willowherb round here, as indeed is most of the country which accounts for the large population of this fine moth.

Colour isn't the only register of beauty in moths, of course, and these little micros demonstrate the rival virtues of delicacy and graceful patterning, even though the first one is very worn. It's a Beautiful China-mark like the one I showed three posts ago but with the strongly contrasting brown and white very faded. Below it is a relative, Ananaia coronata, in a much fresher state.

Now is the high season for flimsy, fluttery and pale moths with very large numbers of the large Mother of Pearl micro,  Pleuroptya ruralis, beginning to appear. This species is noteworthy for its purply, opalescent sheen as shown on the pair below.

The Single-dotted wave is another example, below, as is the creamier Small Scallop which follows it and the wonderfully pure-looking Common White Wave.

Ditto the Muslin Footman which, hard though it is to believe, is a close relative both of the Scarce Footman which follows it below, and the spectacular Rosy Footman whose arrival in my granddaughter's trap I described two posts ago.

And now let's celebrate today with some jewelled moths - the good old Silver Y which was one of the first moths I ever saw. They fly by day as well as night and are often to be seen as a whirr of grey nectaring on brambles and darting too and fro.  Then we have both colourways of the Brown-line Bright-eye whose 'eye' is bright indeed. and lastly a Burnished Brass variety aurea with its central brown line wholly separating the two patches of gleaming golden green.  The way in which moth and butterfly wing scales use light to create these shining colours is one of Nature's marvels.

Moths can celebrate beauty too in the sheer complexity of their camouflage colours as with this Marbled Beauty crouching on our house wall a few inches above a Willow Beauty which is doing the same thing. I missed both of them in my preliminary scan of surfaces close to the light trap. 

Last in this procession is this Common Emerald whose faded colouring did not fare well against the dull black plastic of the trap's bowl where it was perched until it fluttered off to a bush where things improved.

And so to some butterflies: a Meadow Brown peeping down into our greenhouse (and thankfully staying out of its fierce temperatures which UK butterflies and moths cannot endure for long).

Then we have a trio from the lovely Trap Grounds nature reserve by the canal in central Oxford, a fascinating urban oasis where you are well-rewarded by wildlife of all kinds if you have the patience to sit and watch.  I also met a Ringlet, a Small White (deadly but lovely enemy of cabbage growers), severl Gatekeepers or Hedge Browns and to round off this post, a Two-banded Wasp hoverfly, Chrysotoxum bicinctum, the first to be recorded in the reserve although I suspect that they have just gone un-noticed. I only spotted this one because it photobombed my session with the Gatekeeper.

Oh and before I close, Comma butterflies are providing us with brilliant flashes of russet as they fly powerfully round the garden and a nearby path between a field of oats and a line of trees.  I wish that they were fritillaries but you can't have everything and we do well enough.