Brightly-coloured Jersey

The rise and rise of the Jersey Tiger moth is a reason for great happiness. Since 1990, when it was still an immigrant rarity largely confined to Devon, it has colonised rapidly across the Southern UK and is now being recorded from the North. As you may know and can certainly see here, it is a wonderfully colourful insect, so much so that in places such as the Upper Thames Butterfly Sightings web page it makes appearances as a sort of honorary butterfly.

It is also a glorious photographic trophy on Mediterranean holidays, as I've described in previous posts and you may have seen it in Rhodes' famous 'Valley of the Butterflies' which are in fact Jersey Tiger moths.

The 'butterfly' status is also partly a result of the species fondness for flying by day unlike almost all other moths and, when flying, showing those glorious hindwings which are usually demurely concealed when the insect is at rest. in that mode, the reason for its name becomes clearer, the tiger-stripes of creamy yellow and black.

In the second picture above, it is resting alongside a thumbnail micro which shows that, although not large, it is a decent-sized moth as well. When I have seen one suddenly zigzag across the garden on recent sunny days, I have often had a sudden thought - hope! - that it might be a fast-flying fritillary of the sort I've yet to see nearer here than Bernwood Forest 14 miles away or - a solitary female Silver-washed - at Boar's Hill's Matthew Arnold Nature Reserve half that distance from my home.    

I have never had much luck at persuading Jersey Tigers to show their petticoats by tickling them in the eggboxes because they promptly fly away, but in the case of the top two photos, I was lucky that one got into our garden shed and fluttered in panic against the sunlit windows. It quickly grew tired of these exertions and forgot to rest with its wings folded back. I got my photograph and then cupped it in my hands and sent it soaring off into the sky.

For more than 60 years, I have had two Jersey Tigers in my butterfly and moth collection, a relic from the days when cameras affordable by a schoolboy were hopelessly inadequate to capture decent images of butterflies and moths. Even the expert photographs in famous books such as Professor E B Ford's Butterflies in the Collins New Naturalist series were inadequate compared to the results from a modern iPhone.

Over the years, as you can see from the moths above and the Garden Tigers to their right and Cream-spot Tigers below, the colours have faded although it is just possible that the pinned moths are the form lutescens which replaces the red with yellow in both insects. Alas, I caught the moths on holiday abroad and no longer know, although I think that I would remember any rarity I found in those youthful, pot-hunting days.