A Green Thought

Oh what a lovely moth came this week! A Scarce Silver Lines which is one of the greenest of the UK's relatively few green moths and very seldom encountered by me. Indeed I thought that this visitor was the seventh of the debut moths which have arrived this year, but on checking, I found that I have had one previous stay here in Oxfordshire; forgotten either through ager or because I initially identified it wrongly as the more common (and also very lovely) Green Silver Lines.

Another came to my trap in Leeds in the first year of this blog when I noted that two had visited the trap four years earlier in 2004, the very earliest days of my light-trapping. So I must get my act together so far as my memory is concerned. Not an unusual problem at the age of 76, which is some consolation.

Meanwhile here, above, is another picture of this week's example, showing its beady eye and a view of the delicious insect from overhead below, followed by another inside the trap's bowl where the green seems to glow even more in the relative darkness; and finally a more distant photo of it next to a Small Fan-footed Wave to give scale. They are not very big moths.

 Here's the little Wave again below, along with my somewhat less elegant fingers, and below that a nice, sharply-patterned little Cypress Pug, a Toadflax Pug, a Riband Wave and a Small Bloodvein.

One of the things I always keep in my pocket is a small penknife because the saying "You never know when you might need it" is absolutely true, I was cleaning it the other day, a process which involves getting all the blades out at the same time. I was reminded of it the following morning by this shapely group of Large Yellow Underwings.

Finally, this sadly-expired Small White, one of our commonest butterflies and a deadly foe of cabbage and other brassica growers, struck me as very lovely on careful inspection.  I zoomed in on its wings and then did the same with one of the many Centre-barred Sallows which are currently visiting, in an effort to capture the shining beauty of the scale-covered wings.