Everyday events

 

I'm having a bit of a catch-up today as the moths are coming thick and fast in this high season for the light trap and I am getting behind. My first picture, however, relates to butterflies rather than moths; a clutch of Large White eggs which I discovered on the underside of a large nasturtium leaf in the garden. Very beautiful in their symmetry and delicate scoring. But most unwelcome as we grow cabbages, broccoli and sprouts.

Indeed, after I put the left-hand picture of the possible mother of the eggs on our family's Insect Watch WhatsApp group, and received various sentimental responses of 'How lovely!' and the like, I added the adapted photo on the right. Beautiful maybe, but a menace.

                                              

The sun has arrived at last and now is proving a very good time for daylight wanderings in our immediate countryside where I often put up resting moths such as the little chap above whose ID I'm still sorting out. I often startle rather larger neighbours as in the photo below which reminded me so much of Bambi. Not that I'm sentimental about deer either, I'm afraid, as they present an even bigger threat to the garden than 'cabbage' white butterflies.

Other creatures abound, almost always betrayed by movement as was this case with the cricket or grasshopper below. After that comes a Silver Y, often to be found buzzing about on bramble or clover during the day, and a Small Magpie still with dew on its wings. 

Moth trap visitors have included this lozenge-shaped form stramineola of the Dingy Footman (an undeserved name), the Small Scallop with its sharply angled wings, a Common but very pretty Carpet and a Dun-bar

My final moth is one for which I have much fondness because as schoolboys, my friends and I used to catch their caterpillars feeding in the evening on dew at the top of long stalks of grass and then keep them until they chrysalised and hatched into impressively large, gingery-brown Drinker moths. The name comes from the caterpillar's habit which made it so easy to find and imprison. 

So for old times' sake, I was pleased to rescue this one which had got enmeshed in a spider's web and was about to go the way of smaller predecessors which had fallen into the same trap. I couldn't free it entirely from the tenacious silk, but I settled it a very long way away from the spider.

To conclude; a picture which sums up the daytime rambles with which I started today, and a small collage of encounters near the romantically ruined manor house at Hampton Gay whose owner has recently done some excellent stabilisation work.  I remember vividly coming across this spot as a student in 1969 and it is wonderfully little-changed.