Belated happy New Year!

Goodness, it's been a while since I posted. I have woken from my Winter torpor after a friend emailed from Brazil saying that he had been showing this blog to one of his friends. I felt ashamed that what they were seeing was so out of date.

There are a couple of reasons besides the slowing down which gradually comes with age. One is obvious: this is not a very interesting time of the year to be looking for moths. The other is technical: my mercury vapour bulb started playing up shortly after my last post in November and I have not yet sorted that out. It may limp on, or I may have to source a new one, which is getting harder because of various electrical regulations. 

Anyway, I have a moth picture! Actually two. They are not new although they were last Winter when I first came across a little colony of over-wintering Buttoned Snouts in the cobwebby gloom of an outbuilding. This week I was crawling around there and discovered that they are still happily settled.  My first two pictures show ones which I disturbed, the second rather worse for wear, no doubt after encounters with cobwebs and other obstacles in its dingy home.

They are not alone there, so far as insects are concerned. My activities triggered several bright flashes of colour as hibernating Peacock butterflies were disturbed. I'm glad to say that they went back to sleep, as the weather outside was foul and anything capable of hibernation was well-advised to keep slumbering.

 Here's another one in the house, disturbed when I got down a book and then choosing a dangerous new 'bed' in the event of grandchildren coming to stay. I carefully picked it up and tucked it away on a shelf, getting a fine display of those lovely wings before it folded them again and went back to sleep.

I have often said here that although human beings have the advantage over moths in most things, I am jealous of their antennae which we lack (unless they are hidden in our heads/brains; I am not qualified to rule on that). Hibernation is another quality which many of them have but none of us. Rip van Winkle, alas, was fiction.