Starting a Family the Merveille Way

 

I've been chirping away happily about the Merveille du Jour recently, the beautiful regular visitor to my moth trap at the tail-end of the season. Now here is a double treat: two Merveilles doing what comes naturally to moths and all other forms of life, including us.

I'm sorry to invade their privacy but it was a welcome sight as I had earlier decided to carry out a second distribution of the species to less favoured parts of our area, prompted by the arrival of four Merveilles in one night.

Here they are settling down comfortably in another of my moth ferries, which I slipped gently into one of my bike panniers for the half-hour ride to Summertown. They looked sleepy but two of them definitely were not. Behold what I found when Penny and I met our friend in a café for the handover:

A good sign, I hope, for a project partly triggered by a post from a fellow recorder on the Upper Thames Moths Facebook page (the same excellent source which put me on to the Pale-lemon Sallow in my last post) who has just moved from central Oxford to the rural suburb of Boar's Hill.  After a life without Merveilles du Jour, he has been visited by one straight away in the trap at his new home.  

Given that we have a positive glut of the lovely things in my garden, I thought that I would make a start on putting that right so that others in more central parts of the city would get a chance to see the moth too. I hope that this is acceptable to one and all; the introduction of 'new' species can be controversial and make some experts cross, as in the notorious case of an introduced colony of the continental mainland Map Butterfly in Gloucestershire in the early 20th century. A leading collector wiped it out, to equal anger from other entomologists who supported the project. 

Such small tempests benefit no one; and anyway my efforts involve just a few miles and little change in habitat, with plenty of the Merveille's favourite oak and ivy in the travellers' new home.  Meanwhile my visitors also gave me the chance of photoing the species'  underside, as one of them was particularly sleepy and obligingly rolled over when I gently tipped its eggbox. 

Now a change to a different colourway: yellow. The two moths below look as different as an omelette and scrambled egg but are actually the same. Each is a Sallow, the principal member of a small family whose brightness always cheers the Autumn here - and which has recently given me great excitement through the spread of the previously rare Pale-lemon Sallow exulted-over in my last post.

The extent of the Sallow's orangey-brown patterning is extremely varied for no known reason and the plain one in my first picture has been given the honour of its own sub-name: form flavescens meaning 'turning yellow' in Latin.

Another yellow favourite is still making occasional visits, the Swallow-tailed Moth below, which is followed by two shots of my most common visitor from the Sallows, the Barred, which also comes in several different forms.

Then we have a nice surprise: a Vapourer with its Hallowe'en 'eyes' and a name derived from the invisible trails of pheromone scent which the wingless female emits, much like her human counterparts graced by the products of Chanel and the like. I was ambushed long ago by one of the Vapourer's very fine, colourful and tussocky caterpillars while building our tree house.

And here's another yellow moth, but one which determinedly hides the vivid yellowy-orange bands on its underwings except when in flight: the Least Yellow Underwing.

Lastly, a boring-looking visitor in the Wax moth, whose dull appearance hides an interesting relationship with bees. Oh, and a joyful note from a national moth Facebook page that the Clifden Nonpareil's extraordinary comeback from virtual extinction has now reached Northumberland!  I haven't seen one this year, but it's fine by me if they've ll gone tearing off to the lovely North.