Pea in a pod, or at least an eggbox

 

Who wouldn't fall in love with a moth with the name of Cream-bordered Green Pea? Certainly not me. I've been waiting for this delightful speck of green to arrive for more than 20 years and finally it has. Way back in 2010, I wrote wistfully in a post about green moths that one day I hoped that the Pea would appear in the eggboxes. So, a warm welcome!

It is pretty scarce locally as you can see from this excellent map of records produced by Upper Thames Moths for which I am very grateful. I wonder if this is a one-off caused by our exceptionally lovely warm weather, or whether it will visit me again.

My second Hummingbird Hawk of 2025 came flying in yesterday but sadly I only discovered it after it had found its way into our greenhouse and expired from the heat. These beautiful little moths, which are so fascinating to watch, are plentiful in local gardens at the moment. A neighbour has just WhatsApped with a sighting of three at once.

Other hawks are incredibly abundant too. I had more than 30 bright pink Elephants in the trap on the first night back from the States. Dozing beside them were two Privets, the UK's third largest moth, and a Poplar. I still await Pine and Eyed this year.

The Leopard moth comes here at least once a year and last night was its tryst for 2025, a highly distinctive creature with an element of hornet beneath its delicate white and spotted veil of wings. It was also good to find a White Satin whose curious head markings prompted me to add an emoji spook.

Other arrivals, below, include Flame Shoulder, Poplar Grey, Riband Wave and the dreaded Box Moth, followed by Clay, Broad-bordered Yellow Underwing, Swallowtail and the large micro European Corn-borer which was a rare migrant until it took to English life in the 1930s and started spreading.

Another debut for the year is the Peppered Moth below, famous in disputes about natural selection and seldom found these days in the melanistic, dark form which was prevalent in the days of heavy industrial pollution. A little ermine micro provides scale.

Back in the world of multitudes, the Dark Arches has assumed its familiar late-June role as top moth and the heatwave has brought hundreds of the little white/transparent micro which litter the base of the trap, looking dead but usually just asleep.

Navigating them here in conclusion is a Small Fan-footed Wave. More tomorrow from this busy, busy time of the year.

American interlude

So you're not in England, Mr W?

Nope. How did you guess?

Well, we certainly don't see glorious Scarce Swallowtails like that here. In France, Spain or Greece, OK, plenty. But we're too foggy and damp.

True enough, though this wonderful creature is actually an Western Tiger Swallowtail, an American relative of the Scarce, because P and I have been in California for a week, attending a touching memorial and celebration for her first cousin. A couple of days after taking the pictures above in Palo Alto, the centre of Silicon Valley, I spotted a similar-looking butterfly in the beautiful grounds of the nearby historic home of Filoli. I nearly didn't bother to take another picture but I.m glad I did. This one, shown in the two pictures below, was not an Eastern Tiger but another relative. The Pale or Pallid Swallowtail; aptly named as you can see if you compare it with the stronger lemon-yellow of the Eastern Tiger.

We pride ourselves on the beauty and inventiveness of English names for butterflies and moths, with good reason, but the Americans go one better in my view. There's an energy and directness, perhaps like Mark Twain compared with Jane Austen. Here's the Buckeye for example, in a garden (or yard as the Americans prosaically call them) in downtown Palo Alto:

And here's a Fiery Skipper and a Lulworth Skipper, separately and then darting about in either angry or amorous manoeuvres on lavender with a possible Rural Skipper involved as well. 

 

Sharing the bush with them in the Alto Hills was a Funereal Duskywing, a very solemn moniker for an admittedly rather subdued-looking insect - although it has a light fringe not unlike the Camberwell Beauty whose alternative name is Mourning Cloak.

On a bush in a wooded part of the trail - doubtless toxic like the ubiquitous Poison Ivy and Poison Oak which put you off exploring very effectively, I also saw these two butterflies which the iPhone's Bug identifier suggests are members of the Copper family, the second perhaps a Tailed Copper judging by the just-visible detail on its left hindwing.

This very definitely tailed beauty, below, in the Elizabeth F Gamble garden in central Palo Alto - a lovely, freely-open space tended by eager volunteers - is a Grey Hairstreak, another very smart-looking butterfly which we sadly don't see in the UK:

And so to my only moth, a drab visitor on the doorstep of the cousins' home which another young cousin, a very keen insect student, identified kindly as a Black Rustic. It lacks the distinctive golden wing marks and steeply isosceles shape of our UK moth of the same name but has a similar, rather foreboding presence. My iPhone counters that it may alternatively be Aseptis fumosa, a moth widespread in the Western US but apparently not yet honoured with an English name.

My last American minibeast is a Carpenter Bee, perhaps a Valley one. It was single-mindedly nectaring on the Baby Sage and took no notice of my cautious pursuit.

The chaparral or maquis and woodland above Palo Alto is full of other animals, some of which we did not want to meet - see below. Our cousins have had rattlesnakes, bobcats, coyotes and - once - a cougar or mountain lion in their garden and the notices on the hiking trails are to be taken seriously.

Here are some milder animals and birds, all of them very common both in the wild and the gardens of the large houses which fringe the hills: deer, wild turkeys, Western Fence Lizards, quails, a humming bird, a raven and a mourning dove.  

And not forgetting Sasha the resident Jack Russell and Winston the aptly-named visiting bulldog.

Delicate beauties

 

I have been enjoying a spell of lovely, delicate moths such as the quartets shown above and below. I have always had a weak spot for anything green in the trap and the Common Emerald, top right, along with the Green Oak Tortrix, bottom left, are fine examples. Part of their beauty lies in its fleeting nature; within weeks that lovely colour will fade like the transitory chalk creation of a street artist.

The other two moths above are an unusually pale and pure Single-dotted Wave and the aptly-named Beautiful China-mark, one of the loveliest of our UK micro-moths. Continuing with this theme, we have a glowing Clouded Silver, top left, followed by an stylish Cypress Carpet, a Large Twin-spot Carpet and a little Treble Brown-spot, a species which I first encountered on a window-box in central London.

The year's first Mother of Pearl also put in an appearance, one of the largest of our micros - a lot bigger than a score of macro moths - with a singularly lovely opalescent sheen. This one was in our shed, far away from the light trap which will soon be full of its relations.

Next, we have a Ringed China-mark shown next to a repeat of its Beautiful cousin and then an angle-winged Bloodvein and a second,  less clearly-marked Treble Brown-spot. They are followed by a fresh and handsome example of the Phoenix, a smart relation of the tribe of Carpet moths (none of which eat carpets, I hasten to add. The name comes from 18th century English entomologists' comparison of the moths' patterns with those on carpets newly-arriving in quantity from the Far East).

The quartet below starts with a Bird-cherry Ermine, a splinter of a micro but responsible for those larval and pupation webs which sometimes cover entire trees (and even, on occasion, cars parked for too long beneath them). Then we have a Large Fruit-tree Tortrix, one of the commonest of these shield-shaped micros round here, a Common Pug and a distinctively pallid and rather misnamed Orange Footman.

An LoL for Laugh Out Loud (rather than Loads of Love) Longhorn comes next, probably the most frequent here which has a name as along as its antennae: Nematopgon swammerdamella, but it is too tricky an ID for me to be absolutely certain.  Below it are a micro of a type which it exhausts me even to think of ID-ing and then, as a relief, a nicely-marked Common Swift. This is a very varied moth and I've added an example which came the same night in the second picture below.

Talking of variation, here are two very different Clouded Borders which were in the eggboxes together. Below them we have a Smoky Wainscot, a White Plume micro, a freshly-emerged Flame with its tiny blueish spot which on very close inspection turns out to be an interesting combination of greys, black and white which trick the eye, and another Bird-cherry Ermine.

My final composite shows a rather battered Something (ID in due course I hope), a Common Quaker, a Dark Arches - one of my commonest visitors over the course of a typical Summer - and another Tortric, the Brown Oak. Then follow a string of individual moths; there are just SO many around at this high point in the Moth Year.

A worn-out micro with a suitable caption; ID coming soon

An Oak Nycteoline, a species which I have only encountered knowingly in the last couple of years, including a lively colony which overwintered in our attic

Another Orange Footman, equally un-orange to the one I showed earlier

A Figure-of-80, unhelpfully upside down

Another 'markings' moth and perhaps the best-known: the Silver Y

Small Square-spot, followed by the rather similar...

...Double Square-spot

A Common Wainscot, shown because of the unusual 'Come and Get Me' mating twist of its body, something often seen in Carpets and the like but less frequently in larger moths such as this

A Vine's Rustic

And a Ringed China-mark, less distinctively patterned than the one shown earlier

And finally, a Large Yellow Underwing, the same moth photoed first in the trap and secondly on a leaf to which it escaped, showing the ability of my otherwise excellent iPhone camera to 'lie' as it quests around for as much light as it can find.

On that score, all the moths in this rather long post came on the night of a 'strawberry moon', a very large Moon low in the sky with its colouring affected by atmospheric pollution. In spite of what doctored photos in the media would have you believe, this phenomenon is not strawberry-coloured. It takes its name from its coincidence with the ripening of wild strawberries, as collected by a young neighbour, below.

And lastly, if you are still awake, here is a tailend celebration of the glorious butterfly season. These lovely, bright insects are creatures of the sunshine and, thank goodness, we have been enjoying a lot of that. Below, a Ringlet, two Marbled Whites and a Hedge Brown and in conclusion a Red Admiral (not naval but a slide from 'admirable'), showing the effective camouflage of its hindwings.  It opens them occasionally to reveal its other defence against predators: a brilliant flash of red.