Quiet times

There's supposed to be a warmer spell this coming week but so far hopes of an Indian Summer in the UK have gone the way of the rest of a below-average season all round. Wet and cold is how I will remember 2024 although we have had some stunning short periods of real warmth and the occasional brilliant day. Yesterday was one of them.

The clear sunny sky meant a cold night to follow, however, and the trap was thinly populated this morning. The best arrival was the very fresh Dark Marbled Carpet shown in my first picture, resting happily on the outside of the cowl. 

My other main moth in the last few days has been the Angle Shades, one of the species most commonly sent to me for ID because they seem easily-disturbed by day. This happened to me on a bike ride earlier this week when I brushed a hedge and an Angle Shades whizzed out before skulking back into the shadows - pic below.

Two days later, I was cycling along again when I noticed the moth's unmistakable fighter-plane shape on the tarmac just ahead. I managed to stop and gently lifted it on my finger to the safety of a bush. It had been raining gently and you can see the large raindrop illustrating the effectiveness of the waterproofing of the moth's wings.

Cousins on holiday in Spain have meanwhile had a more exciting time, thanks to their vigilant spotting of another triangular shape on a workaday litter bin. Can you see it in the top pic below? Move down, if not. The spotters are part of a great family network on WhatsApp called Insect Chat which is impressively successful at interesting a new generation in entomology and indeed wildlife of all kinds.

This is a Convolvulus Hawk, one of Europe's largest moths and a rarity in the UK.  By chance, my only encounter with one was at the wedding in Cornwall of another cousin from the same side of the family as the Spanish I-Spy team.  You can read more if you'd like to, here.

Beware of the Elephants

Some good friends set me the challenge above which is handy at this time of the year when caterpillars are wandering around looking for somewhere to chrysalise. I knew the answer because my acquaintanceship with this appealing creature goes back to my early teens when the head of natural history at Leeds Museum, a lovely man called John Armitage, encouraged me and my brother to go and search for them at the end of the Summer holidays.

It's an Elephant Hawk moth cattie and its colour is the sign that it is ready to tuck itself away in a cocoon. The caterpillars are green for almost all their lives, turning olivey-brown and then grey only at the very end. 

This is when they look like elephants' trunks - well, if you half-shut your eyes and open your imagination - and accounts for the name of the moth which often puzzles people. The adult insect is a beautiful pink and lime green and bears no resemblance to an elephant except for those mythical pink ones.

Elephants are loved by all and feature in some of our best children's stories including The Elephant and the Bad Baby which was written by an excellent woman, Elfrida Vipont, who was a prominent Quaker and wrote completely different books about the Quaker way of life. Mind you, The Elephant and the Bad Baby has a very gentle moral point, sugared by the fact that the Bad Baby is a most appealing character.

One of its fans was my granddaughter, now a great entomologist, who sent me the picture below of a Brimstone Moth at Birmingham airport railway station, with a quiz for Granny and myself about what the full sign said. (Granny won with 'Customer Services'). The granddaughter got into quite a conversation with the station staff who said that a lot of Brimstone moths came to their lights and reflective signs at night. So there's a curious piece of species data.

Another young friend, whose topknot can just be seen at the bottom of the next picture, kindly sent me this spot from the canal. She knows that we have had narrowboats pass through with the names of every single member of our family, remote cousins included. And now we have a moth. 

The trap is fairly routine at the moment, but that is not to denigrate the arrivals, including bright little micros such as this Pyrausta purpuralis, a slightly less common relative of the familiar Mint Moth, Pyrausta aurata, which often flickers around near our herbs.

There's also a good number of moths every night and overcrowding in the cones is commonplace - here we have an Angle Shades with its umbrella-style wing-folding visible on the left, a Large Yellow Underwing lurking at the back, a Rosy Rustic and a little ermine micro at the front.

Next we have that fine creature, a Common Marbled Carpet, really quite a size bigger than most otrher carpet moths, and finally a Gothic, very well-named with its patterning so like the spars of an ancient church window.