Bad photograph day

Sorry about the quality of the photographs today, but I've been in London for a mothless trip. I managed this sneak pic of an exhibit at the Royal Academy's summer exhibition, which is a wild and whacky mix as usual. The Guardian critic said it depressed him, but he must be a rather sensitive soul. Exhibit No 787 (out of 1266) for instance is Butterfly Can (Motorised) by Tim Lewis of East London. I wouldn't pay the asking price of £2,800 or anything like it, but it's a fun object, with the butterfly snipped out of the pop can's side, then fixed on the lid and motorised so that it opens and shuts its wings.

Earlier on we chanced on these bees enjoying themselves in Gage Street, off Holborn. I know the world continues to be exercised by the alleged disappearance of bees, but I keep seeing loads of them and feel it my duty to pass such sightings on. A passing woman wondered why I was photographing the pavement with my mobile phone, and we got into a discussion about bee-loud glades. Yes, even in London WC1

A green light and a green shade

Meet the finest of all the green moths which come regularly to my garden: the Green Arches. Last year, I had little success in photographing these - if you scroll back to July and August, there are a couple of pictures but the specimens were battered and had lost their lustre. Only last week I was moaning, too, about not being able to get a decent shot of a GA which crept right into an eggbox pyramid and hid there. Better luck this time, at least I hope you agree. Continuing my adventures in photography, I've done one straightforwardly and the other with a pocket torch gripped between my teeth like some modern film director. On that score, isn't it great that Bradford has been named as Unesco's first City of Film (in the world). No doubt LA and Cannes will catch up, but hooray for the setting of Billy Liar and birthplace of Simon Beaufoy whose Slumdog Millionaire deservedly got eight Oscars.

The blog's first-ever poem...

What's this moth?
It's rather lame
But I haven't a clue.
Maybe a Flame?

Comment below
If you know its name

Can I be Oxford Professor of Poetry now please...



(But seriously, what is it? I would call it the Fag-end. It came a couple of nights ago and it's certainly distinctive. Judging by its shoulder mark, it's a lance-corporal. The Flame looks the likeliest bet, but I am usually wrong. Solutions gratefully received).

Phew, what a scorcher

Here's an interesting visitor: a Scorched Wing. Most of the moths in my trap are described in my book as Common, lovely though they are. This one is Local. That isn't in the Royston Vazey sense, that it runs a local shop and asks you in a tiny but threatening voice: "Can I help you at all?" It means that it tends to be found a more limited number of areas. I'm glad that Leeds is one. Its name comes from the darkened, trailing corners of its wings, although the almost op-art, mobile form of its wider colouring is what interests me. Modern artists have been inspired by this sort of thing. Damien Hirst was brought up about a mile-and-a-half from where I'm writing this, so maybe he encountered one as well.

Look at its tail too. That means that it's a male - a habit of curling the body which happens in several other similar, small moths. The absolutely brilliant paintings in Waring and Townsend, by Richard Lewington, faithfully illustrate this.




The caterpillar of the Scorched Wing (photo from W&T, thanks) is a marvellous example of mimicry. More room for Darwinian thoughts here, although I've got to get on now with something else. btw my noble Guardian colleague Jane Perrone got me to do an entry on her excellent gardening blog for the paper which you can read, if you haven't had enough on www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/gardening-blog/2009/jun/08/moths Actually she refers back to this blog, so if you want, you can also ping pong too and fro.

Going for a spin

My niece Jessie has sent me this startling picture from the Sun (whose headline I have shamelessly borrowed). The power of cocoon spinning is pretty awesome. But then think where silk comes from - plus the item on the news this week about scientists testing spider thread for other uses. I would have thought that they'd done that by now, but there's so much that we still don't understand in the natural world. This eerie picture comes from Spuikade, Holland, where the caterpillars have made their communal nest after stripping the leaves from nearby trees. (As one Sun reader advises on the thread - appropriate term: don't park under trees). By coincidence, my American pal Sarah comments on exactly this phenomenon two entries below.

Here is the Spindle Ermine
and a few of its caterpillars, which you do get in the UK, so beware. Spindle is the shrub Euonymus which I must admit, I never knew. Thank you, Jessie and the Sun.

Common but tasteful

Not all the moths we find here come to the trap. This is a Common Marbled Carpet which spent yesterday evening on our bathroom roller blind. I persuaded it outside to avoid a fate like that of the last Caliph of Baghdad who was rolled up in a carpet and smothered by Ghengis Khan's Mongols in 1258. I like this variant because even I can easily identify it; other forms of the CMC are frustratingly like lots of the (many,many) other carpet moths. Penny likes it because of the tasteful way its wing patches co-ordinate with the russet background. It would be very un-Darwinian to suggest that Common Marbled Carpet was aware of this, but ever since a Peppered Moth chose an eggbox barcode to snooze on (see last year's blog, many a scroll-click down), I have wondered.

On the run..or at least crawl

Here's the year's first caterpillar, pictured making a break from one of our veg beds where Penny and I have been frantically gardening in between attending late night, and very depressing, election counts. It's a Large White, I think, although generally they're outnumbered here by their Small and Green-veined relatives; I shall do some research later when time allows. It was twisting its head (the bit at the top of the pic) nervously about in a way which I've noticed before in fully-grown caterpillars. Either it's a symptom of The Change coming, which is pretty spectacular; imagine turning from something squashy and soft like this into a hard, sharp-edged chrysalis. Or it's got an infestation from a parasitic wasp, a very nasty fate but Nature's helping hand for those of us who grow cabbages.

Charlotte and friends

I mentioned Bronte moths a few entries back, and here's a selection. It was very cool last night (British weather...who'd believe we'd just had all that sun), and they came out in their dark coats and bonnets. I think that the top one is a Dark Marble Carpet with small micro-friend (No, no I'm wrong - see wise Comments), and below are two Scalloped Hazels, one called variety Nigra for obvious reasons. These are all the sort of moth which seldom gets a second glance, but if you click on the pics, or indeed meet one in the wild, they are worth studying closely for the intricate patterns.



Carpet moths tend to wake up instantly when you disturb the trap, and flutter off. Bigger ones, such as as the Hazels, can be almost impossible to wake. Here's a Heart and Dart, too, another of this year's new arrivals of a regular. One I featured last year prompted an interesting exchange with the Heart and Dart soap shop in New York.

Do you watch Have I Got News For You? The episode repeated last night was a major triumph for moths. Clive Anderson and Paul Merton got into a whacky riff about brushing them, which is impossible to explain but was lavish publicity. If you scroll down a few posts to the Pale Tussock, you'll see that brushing moths could actually be quite interesting, on pony-grooming lines. If you know Messrs A or M, please tell them. Actually, partly because it's such a nice pink rhododendron in the background, I've added this picture, left, of last week's Pale Tussock to show its brushability. Click on it and take in that left antenna (the one which isn't blurred)!

I've got my eyes on you

I'm giving the moths a break for a few days, after catching several of the same ones two or three nights running. I'm not sure what the scientific wisdom is on this, but I guess that a spell of successive visits to the trap leaves them feeling the same as we did as students, after too much partying.

Here, meanwhile, is an image which I just had to pass on. Not taken by me, needless to say. It's from the picture library at the Natural History Museum in London which is running an excellent attraction called the Butterfly Jungle until 27 September - open daily, 10am - 6pm (last admissions 5pm), see www.nhm.ac.uk/visit-us/whats-on/butterfly-jungle/index.html

A friend's been and much enjoyed it. He sent me a set of postcards including this, which is the head of a Small Tortoiseshell butterfly magnified more than 25 times. Scary and hairy, eh, but stunning what intricacies there are in a passing, short-lived and common, although very beautiful, insect.

Meet your greens

I must start looking for lime trees. I don't recall any growing near our house, but this morning the second hawk moth of this summer was slumbering in the trap. It's a Lime Hawk, whose caterpillars prefer lime, predictably. They will eat elm leaves too, but elms have long gone from round here. The moth looks a little worn, although it cannot have hatched too long ago; their season starts in mid-May. Contrary to the usual gloom about wildlife, this is a species on the increase. It was rare in Yorkshire until the 1950s, but has since settled, although it's not a common visitor to our garden. I've just checked back through my pre-blog records and found only one, on a warm June night like the one we've had: 9 June 2006.




More greens meanwhile. Apart from the Lime Hawk, last night produced a Green Arches, a moth with particularly subtle colouring which defies my camera skills, and another Green Silver Lines, this time a female. If you click on the lower picture, right, you can admire her lovely pink legs. I think and hope this species is here to stay.

Familiar friends

This second trap 'n' blog season is getting like a school reunion. On Monday, the first White Ermine of 2009 turned up, followed on Friday by a Peach Blossom. On cue, the first Buff Arches was dozing in an egg box this morning, a close relative of the Peach Blossom although they look like chalk and cheese. Both are a reason for sparing a few brambles in your neighbourhood, because that's what they eat. This applies forcefully to nettles as well, which sustain the caterpillars of some of our most colourful butterflies, the Peacock, Red Admiral and Small Tortoiseshell.

Another welcome visitor, also very much on cue: the first hawk moth of the season. It's a Poplar Hawk and shows exactly the ability as its predecessors last year to squash itself gymnastically into snug spaces in the carton pile.

Lobbing eggs at the grass roots

I've been scrolling back to last year to answer my American friend Sarah's query in her comment on the post below. In the process, I came across the entry last July (14th, Vive la France!) about finding a female Green Silver Lines moth snoozing on my Mum's front door. I brought it home to photograph and ended by speculating that we might have started a colony here. Well maybe we have. I'd forgotten about this episode when I posted four days ago about finding a lovely male Green Silver Lines in the trap. Thus distribution can work, although in this case, the distance is only about three miles.



Meanwhile, last night brought two apparently very different moths which are actually both Pale Tussocks - fine, hairy beasts with lovely antennae (click on the big pic - they look like quill pens). The dark one, which scarcely seems to deserve the title Pale, is a melanistic version and an interesting indicator of the way Britain's old balance between sooty North and rural South has evened out.
Melanistic Pale Tussocks are much commoner in the South these days, while the melanistic version of the Peppered Moth (much discussed in past posts here) is much rarer in the North than it used to be. Excellent.


This other, pleasantly patterned moth which also came last night is a Common Swift, one of the five of the 500 swift moths in the world which live in Britain. They are unusual in having no proboscis and therefore do not eat, but their caterpillars make up for it by overwintering for two years before pupating. The caterpillars hatch from eggs which the Common Swift lays in flight, skimming low over a foodplant (luckily the favourite is grass roots). Imagine: starting your life as a tiny bomb.

Peachy

I was going to introduce you to last night's Bronte Family of moths which came to the trap - all governessy brown, grey and black and apparently dowdy, but on closer inspection having wonderfully delicate and subtle patterning. But then I got to one of the last eggboxes and found this: the annual delight of the season's first Peach Blossom moth. It's one of the best arguments for taking an interest in moths, a common but beautiful visitor which most people never see. The colouring is very effective camouflage on the lines of 'dazzle' warships (see one of last year's posts, complete with exciting illustration), but I've tried to photograph it so that it stands out a mile.

I've just discovered, through the usual serendipitinous of Google, that there is a Peach Blossom Island in a lake in eastern China, known for its beauty but also as the setting for a novel by Jin Yong (Louis Cha) called The Legend of the Condor Heroes. The plot takes place on a mysterious and beautiful island filled with peach blossoms and secluded from the outside world. Given the global distribution of the Peach Blossom Moth, I bet (and hope) that they feature too.

Aces high

I'm just back from a couple of days at Hay on Wye, helping to promote Guardian Books (check out books link above left, and spend, spend, spend...) It's been raining too, though the prospects look better for tonight. So here's a picture from three weeks ago of the highest butterfly I've ever met - a Field Crescent near the tramway station at 10,386ft on Mount Sandia above Albuquerque in New Mexico. I know what it is, thanks to the completely brilliant website Butterflies and Moths of North America which I mentioned a couple of days ago - www.butterfliesandmoths.org. A couple of emailed pictures, and their moth monitors for New Mexico, Paul Opler and Steve Cary, were back on to me with the details (also of the moth I posted the other day, which - yo for my faltering identification skills - is indeed a Spotted Tussock). Many thanks, guys. Ain't the modern world grand? It would have taken weeks, pre-internet to track such things down in books.

While discussing high-fliers, here's another picture taken by my son Olly of a butterfly visiting a lofty windowsill on the Royal College of Art in London - late afternoon by the length of the shadow. It obviously knew where it was going - it's a Painted Lady.
btw the Field Crescent isn't my highest-ever insect. That was a moth which was on the same flight as us from Manchester to Skiathos a few years ago.

A nice surprise

I thought things were going to be a dead loss today, after rain in the night and with the trap apparently empty. But no; hidden beneath the egg boxes were some interesting arrivals: a Peppered moth (for the third night running), two Scalloped Hazels which look like the latest stealth creation from the United States Air Force, an Early Thorn, and this.

This is a Green Silver Lines, not rare but a favourite of mine because green is an unusual colour in British moths, and it suits both them and the general greenery of our rainsodden landscape. It's a male - they have the pink skirt to their wings, as well as pink antennae. Initially, I thought that the white lines on the back of the head were feathery antennae laid back like the ears of an angry horse. But they are actually part of the moth's delicate patterning.

One of the interests in trapping is seeing if results vary in different parts of the garden. Because rain was forecast, I more or less hid the trap under a rhododendron and a daisy bush. Maybe that's where Green Silver Lineses like to hang out.

Not dead, but sleeping

Bank Holiday Sunday was blissfully sunny, but ended with another cold night and the Maybugs dominated again, with only a few moths for company. Among them was this White Ermine, hanging nonchalantly by one leg from one of my increasingly tatty egg boxes. It's interesting to see how its patterning continues over the body from the wings; something which also happens with the ermines' relatives the Tiger Moths. Why? They're sending a message to predators: I'm pretty, but poisonous.

The merry month

Well it's May, and you're a Maybug, and you meet another Maybug... At least, I think that's what is going on here. I tip-toed away and photographed the other eggbox residents: a fine Peppered Moth, several littlies which I need to identify, plus today's pictured ones: a nice Buff Ermine and two Spectacled moths holding an owlish conclave. They were outnumbered by other Maybugs (aka Cockchafers) but it was a cold night. This morning is lovely by contrast. We look set for a fine day. It won't be the Maybugs' only one in this world, incidentally. The belief that they live just for one day is offbeam; usually they manage five or six weeks. They are also a good counter-indicator of pollution because they like things to be clean. So that's good news for Leeds and my garden.

An American cousin

Gaudeamus/Wahoo - it looks like we're going to get some dry nights. So this year's trapping starts now. Actually it started a little bit earlier, with this moth which was staying at the Sagebrush Inn at Taos, New Mexico, at the same time as Penny and myself two weeks ago.

The States was great for butterflies especially, but I couldn't get near the great big, flapping Swallowtails which swooped around. This moth was a different matter. It was unwakeable, maybe after a late night on the lilacs which honeyfied the whole hotel.

Thanks to the modern wonders of communication, I'm fairly sure that it's a Spotted Tussock, also known as a Yellow-spotted Tiger Moth, according to the quite outstanding website Butterflies and Moths of North America, which must have been early in the IT field because its address is www.butterfliesandmoths.org. I think I'm modestly outstanding too, because I clicked on the Spotted Tussock first of all from the vast list of moths they offer from New Mexico. It has a slight resemblance to our Tussock moths.

Thanks btw to very kind readers who wished me a happy birthday. You can't escape age on the web. As May 18 dawned, or at least before it ended, this blog automatically shifted me on to 59.

Welcome to 2009!

Hi there again! Actually, this is a false start as I'm not going to begin again properly til mid-May. But it's been so sunny here that I dusted down the trap last night and had a go, the first since closedown last year.
It was worth it, even if the moths don't look and sound over-exciting. As well as a couple of dopey wasps there were these three: a Lead-coloured Drab (mean name or what?), an Early Grey, which sounds tea-related and has a lovely, delicate patterning, and a Purple Thorn, which doesn't look purple to me but is quite cheery for an April moth and is the only one in Britain which rests with its wings like that.
The Drab and the Grey are described in my book as 'local' in the North of England, so I have hurried news of their arrival to the Yorkshire Butterfly bods. Now I shall pack everything away and leave you, and the moths, in peace for a few more weeks.

Don't miss next May's thrilling episode

OK, that's it, at least for this year. Dear regular readers, I'll be back in May when trapping starts again. If you've stumbled across this page, or been drawn to it by one of my innumerable email footnote plugs, then please read on - backwards and downwards - should you have time. You may be bored or fed up, or the world may have turned on its dark side for a while. If so, there's a surprising lot of fun and distraction to be had from studying moths. That's true too if you're cheerful and well, which I hope is the case.
For this last entry, I'll do a bit of swanking, though I'm afraid it takes us back to the dark ages of killing bottles and pins. Hard to imagine, now, that I could go on my own into a chemist's shop in Leeds at the age of 12 and chirpily ask for a bottle of killing fluid. And be given one. Anyway, the vivid butterfly in the top picture with the slashes of silver is the rarest I ever caught. I've still got it, as you can see, posed next to the keyboard on which I'm tapping now. It's the Charlotta variety of the Dark Green Fritillary. The standard type is the other butterfly shown, top in the top picture, bottom in the second. The topwings are harder to tell apart, although I remember realising that I'd got something different when I saw the keyhole marks on the border of the bottom wings.
I caught both butterflies above Kynance Cove in Cornwall on the very spot where Prof Edmund Ford made a famous capture of a Monarch, an American butterfly which very occasionally - and probably with the help of ships - makes it to the UK. Most excitingly, for me, the event was recounted to readers of the Yorkshire Evening Post by John Armitage, the wonderful man in charge of the natural history department of Leeds Museum at the time. I've mentioned him before but it bears repeating: he was a brilliant patron of young naturalists and also an exceptionally good forger of postage stamps.
So there we have it. Double-click on the ageing press cutting to read the full story. The last two pictures came my way years later, when I found more references to Charlotta, which was even known by the 19th century woman collector Letitia Jermyn in her 1836 manual, The Butterfly Collector's Vade Mecum, as 'The Queen of England Fritillary.' There's grand. The YEP article, incidentally, was the first time my name appeared in print, apart from class lists in the Bonny Babies' section of Leeds Children's Day 1951. It may be why I became a journalist.

Up in the air

I finally managed to achieve a summer-long ambition last night: hoicking the trap up on to a balcony for a (relatively) high-altitude survey. We made a screen of old towels to protect our kindly neighbours, but alas I'd left it too late. The night was cold and I switched the light off at 11.30pm because rain was forecast, although in the event it hasn't come. The result was a mere two moths. It wasn't a complete waste of time, though, because this one, our old friend the Green Carpet, behaved in a way which increases my interest in how and why moths react to light. Disturbed as I bumbled indoors clutching the trap, it flew fast and drunkenly round in circles, before collapsing on to a pile of books. It tried several times but was far too disorientated to escape. This seems to bear out suggestions that moths are not so much attracted to bright light as confused by it. I shall try to find out more next year. As patient, regular readers will know, I am specially fond of the colour green in moths, so here is another picture with the colour enhanced(ish) by flash. If you double click on it, you will see that the moth's tail, held upwards in that distinctive way, looks exactly like an old-fashioned shaving brush. PS Note Martin Harvey's kind and helpful Comment. This is a Red-Green Carpet, rather than a Green one. Sorry.

View from a (temporary) prison

Penny thought this one was interesting, when I was flicking through the night's photos. On reflection, so do I. It's the moth's-eye view of the mercury vapour lamp from below - although, actually, it's more strictly the view a tiny human would have. Moths' eyes are very different from ours, with lots of lenses set like a honeycomb, as in this picsie below, courtesy of Mainland high school in Daytona Beach, Florida, which has an outstanding page on the subject. The world must be an enormous kaleidoscope to moths.
The big pic shows the only way out of my trap, at least until I creep out in the morning. If you imagine the lamp being on - and it is much too bright for a human to look at directly - you'll understand why the moths prefer to go off to sleep under the eggboxes. Here's another pic, with the same Plume Moth clinging dozily on like a letter T.
Actually there's very little in the trap now, and tonight will be my last session for 2008, provided the rain stays in Lancashire. Apart from the Plume, last night saw a few tattered veterans such as Orange Underwings and these two micros, which look like very small, ermine-clad members of the House of Lords heading off to vote in different lobbies.

A hundred up. Well, nearly...

I know I've mentioned, and indeed pictured, the famous Peppered Moth before. But here's another outing for it, to mark today's status as the International Day of Elderly People. I don't quite qualify for that, yet (see my exciting profile, left below), but it's getting closer. Anyway, I managed to sneak a bit about the Peppered Moth's distinguished place in gerontology and specifically the study of centenarians into the Guardian today. Rather than repeat it, here's the link: http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2008/oct/01/healthandwellbeing.genetics. I was very pleased to find that all the moth people involved reacted extremely speedily, from Mark Parsons of Butterfly (and moth) Conservation and Ben Sherwood of the Linnean Society to the guru Dr Mike Majerus who is mentioned in the piece. He's also the author of the new Moths volume in the wonderful Collins New Naturalist series. He's done Ladybirds too, making him one of the few NN 'double' authors. My hero Prof Edmund Ford was another, writing both the original Moths, plus his great contribution, Butterflies. The other thing about the Peppered Moth is that it stars on innumerable internet references through its unsought role in the debate about 'creationism', in which opinions tend to be firm and furious. Dr Majerus has somewhat undermined the creationist belief that Peppered Moths are not found on tree trunks (relevant to the debate via the evolution of camouflage). In the most recent reference I found yesterday, his tally of such finds was 47.