Clickety-click

A curious beetle leads my post today, salvaged from water and a bit dopey but otherwiese apparently unhurt I think that it is a Click Beetle of some kind - so at least says the iBug facility on my son's 'phone - but which one of the UK's many species it is, I cannot say. I see from online references, however, that its name comes from the click it gives when it makes a little jump. Mine was too stunned by its recent immersion to show this talent off.

It came on a day of drenching rain for the whole morning including the last three hours or so of the moth trap's stint, and so my granddaughter and I were faced with quite a few soggy eggboxes. This made the task of checking the moths a little harder and more dispiriting, so I went back over them later in the day in case we had missed anything. Then I had a third check before stashing everything away and giving the moths a break last night.

I'm glad that I did because it was only on this third audit that I spotted the dart-shaped moth above and below - small enough to be a micro which may be why I hadn't noticed it the first two times. Or maybe I had looked insufficiently closely and dismissed it as the rather similar and currently very common Straw Dot. In fact it is a Pinion-streaked Snout, a little macro moth which has only visited me once before, in 2018, five months before the pandemic.

Of course, I may have hosted it on other occasions but failed to recognise it as I so nearly did yesterday.  Meanwhile here is another nice arrival, an Old Lady moth. This is my top candidate for renaming in our more enlightened times.

Next a Chinese Character moth with its highly distinctive position at rest which accounts for my alternative name for it of the Bird Poo Moth. The Chinese character is the very small silvery tracery in the shape of a trident which is the Chinese pictogram for 'mountain'.

My composite shows a yet to be ID-ed micro, a Flame Shoulder with an attractive pinkish tinge, a Flounced Rustic,  a couple of very differently coloured Snouts, a Light Emerald, a Marbled Beauty, another Light Emerald and a second micro needing ID. I have homework to do.

Finally the Box Moth is still around, doubtless the result of more bingeing by the species' caterpillars on box hedges whose owners must be tearing out their hair at the arrival of the resourceful immigrant species in the UK.