Drinking-up time

Here's a great big Teddy bear of a moth, and one which for me goes back almost to Teddy bear childhood days. It's a Drinker, which I found neatly slumbering beneath an eggbox surrounded by smaller and less exciting companions. More than half a century ago, Drinker caterpillars were part of my life at the age of seven as a boarding schoolboy far from home.

The pig-like snout slightly detracts from the charm

It seems hard to imagine now, but I was despatched at that tender age all the way from Leeds to Herefordshire, in the lea of the beautiful Malvern Hills. After the initial shock, I enjoyed it enormously and had my introduction there to the study of butterflies and moths.

Morning sunshine gives the colouring a glow

The school was run by Quakers who believed in a broad education; indeed, during my five years, their lack of emphasis on a competitive approach to exams led to a parents' revolt, when alarming numbers of otherwise well-rounded and charming children failed to pass the exams necessary to get them into 'big' school. Once a week, a whole afternoon was devoted to 'Hobbies' and mine was butterflies and moths.

We were enthused and ferried about by a young teacher called Mr Hope-Simpson whose nickname of 'Hopeless Sam' was more a play on words than related in any way to the truth. He tipped us off that the handsome caterpillars of the Drinker, with their velvety blue livery, could be found on grass stems of an evening, high up so that they could drink the first dew drops. Hence the moth's name.

So it proved; and we captured and reared a great many - I still remember watching in amazement the hatching of a female, which are larger and paler brown than the male. Thus a lifelong interest was kindled. So it was a pleasure to be reacquainted with the species after all these years and I hope to find caterpillars as well in due course.

One of the Drinker's companions in the trap was a moth new to me, this delicate-looking Muslin Footman, above. It made a fitting companion for a pair of other graceful arrivals shown in the last two photographs: the different variations of the Riband Wave, one with the cross-bar filled in and the other more like tramlines.

My school, incidentally, had a very famous teacher well before my time in W H Auden who wrote his lovely poem A Summer's Night there in 1933. Like him, on hot summer nights we slept in beds outside and learned to appreciate the beauty of our surroundings and the way that goodness in people outweighs the bad. Here's an extract:

Out on the lawn I lie in bed,
Vega conspicuous overhead
In the windless nights of June,
As congregated leaves complete
Their day’s activity; my feet
Point to the rising moon.

Lucky, this point in time and space
Is chosen as my working-place,
Where the sexy airs of summer,
The bathing hours and the bare arms,
The leisured drives through a land of farms
Are good to a newcomer.

Equal with colleagues in a ring

I sit on each calm evening

Enchanted as the flowers

The opening light draws out of hiding

With all its gradual dove-like pleading,

Its logic and its powers:

That later we, though parted then

May still recall these evenings when

Fear gave his watch no look;

The lion griefs loped from the shade

And on our knees their muzzles laid,

And Death put down his book.

It's worth Googling the whole thing.

Beautifully official

When I commented three posts ago, under the heading 'Officially beautiful', that only ten UK moths had the prefix 'beautiful' in their names, I forgot to add that many more have the word 'beauty' as a suffix.  By way of reprimand, one of the most interesting, the Lilac Beauty, has flown into the trap to teach me a lesson.

Apart from its delicate little lilac markings, it has the distinction of an exceptionally unusual way of resting, with the leading edge of its forewings creased and tilted up, as shown in the second two pictures. As my Moth Bible says, this makes it instantly recognisable and thus dear to my moth-identification-challenged heart. It isn't that common, which adds to its appeal.

I have always liked the purplish spectrum as you can see from this picture below, taken in yesterday's sunshine by my younger son, of one of my Uniqlo cardigans. I am seldom to be seen in it in public, sadly, because Penny says it makes me look like an elderly lady. I have included a famous elderly lady in the picture because her tin of Diamond Jubilee shortbread is a lilacy colour too. It was delicious as well as being a bargain, as you can see from the sticker.

Novak Djokovic is sponsored by Uniqlo, which inclines me towards him unpatriotically in today's Wimbledon final. While watching that, I will try to identify this pretty little Carpet (Common, I think) moth below and the micro in the last picture. I'm very pleased with the way that the red of Penny's gardening kneeler goes with not only the micro but two bright glimmers of Birdseye Speedwell, which suggest a blue-eyed ghostie watching from within our lawn.

Is it Dioryctria abietella, or conceivably D. sylvestrella? Goodness, I am quick off the mark today

The sun has put his hat on

Meet a couple of typically beautiful and intelligent citizens of Leeds, swanning about in the sunshine which is bathing the whole of the UK. The English Summer of our memories and dreams is here, big time.

At the top is a Ringlet, a modestly darkish butterfly from above but with these lovely eyes on constant guard below. I was in a garden infested with its commoner relative the Meadow Brown but these were much too skittish and clever for me to get a picture which was anything more than a russet and brown blur. I had better luck with the Small White, foe of cabbage-growers, above.

Back in Oxfordshire this morning, the light trap was full of bounty, with five Burnet moths on the outside of the cover alone, two Privet Hawks and two Elephant Hawks inside, six Peppered Moths (none melanic) and these two lovely firsts for the season (both familiar in Leeds in previous years).

The neighbour is a Small Magpie micro

The first is a Swallowtail, whose colouring varies from the pale lemon caught here to a fuller, more brimstone-like glow which I will pursue if any more arrive. The second is one of my all-time favourites, the Peach Blossom whose colours seen close-up are subtle indeed. Sorry that the final picture of it below is a bit blurry but it was preparing for take-off. There was much more, which I will try to sort out over the weekend. Hope that yours is nice and sunny too.

High as the flag

Menwith - maybe one day the domes will house a Yorkshire version of Cornwall's Earth Centre

Sorry, I'm a bit slow in paying a moth-packed tribute to the 4th of July because Penny and I had to head up north for a couple of engagements, one of them United States-related. Earlier this year, I interviewed the indomitable Lindis Percy for Radio 4; in what I consider to be the true and noble spirit of the best of the States, from the Founding Fathers via Abraham Lincoln to those who challenged McCarthy, she and colleagues in the Campaign for the Accountability of American Bases have mounted a vigil at the eavesdropping base in Yorkshire, Menwith Hill, for over 30 years.

A carpet moth which paid a late night call on the Schweigers when we were having supper with them in Leeds

She asked me to say a few words this year and since I've retired from The Guardian, which subsequently has been at the centre of all the current furore about electronic spying, I agreed. In the manner long-established by Lindis and other protesters, including people such as Martin Schweiger, a universally respected senior public health official in Leeds, it was a friendly, peaceful and Quakerish occasion, aimed at changing hearts through persuasion. My part was to rehearse the great American tradition of freedom and curbs on authority, including the historian Lord Acton's famous warning that 'power tends to corrupt; absolute power corrupts absolutely'. Electronic spying is not absolute power, but it is certainly very, very powerful.

I say all this in the context of a great admiration for the United States, where Penny and I have lots of friends and - in her case - relations, including my excellent commentor here on the blog, the painter Sarah Meredith. Only last month, P and I were admiring a marvellous self-portrait of hers which won a place in the annual exhibition of the Royal Society of Portrait Painters in London. Like all the world's best people, she and her family are moth enthusiasts, and she's kindly allowed me to post two pictures of excellent visitors to her home on the Fourth.

The larger - and top marks to the Merediths for the ballpoint scale - is some sort of American relation of our Poplar or Lime Hawkmoths. Might it be the Azalea Sphinx? The lovely pink and lemon moth is a Rosy Maple, a beautiful creature which I mentioned previously in an Easter post last year, presciently imagining that the Merediths or another excellent Commentor from the States, Banished to a Pompous Land, might be the people to visit in order to see one.

Let's hope that many more pay a call. Meanwhile, a final American note to this post. Just before we headed up north, Penny brought in the washing from the garden with a joyful cry of "There's a moth on your pants!"  So it proved and here it is, with apologies for any resemblance to the vast Calvin Klein underwear adverts which towered over Times Square last time we were in New York. The moth is a handsome Dark Arches. The pants are from Marks & Sparks.

Officially beautiful

 

Only ten of the UK's moths have the word 'beautiful' added to their names and here is one of them: the Beautiful Hook-tip. It deserves the title, partly because its nearest relatives are mostly dull brown, albeit curiously-shaped (like the Snout); and partly because of the subtlety of its wing colouring and patterns.

Here they are closer up. the concentration at the hooked tips appealing to me particularly. You need to look closely as I found when examining the trap. The moth was sitting quietly on the outside of the transparent shield and I almost missed it.

Its caterpillars have an unusual diet: lichen, about which I learned a great deal from a lecture last year to the Leeds Phil & Lit of which Penny was a distinguished committee member. Mark Seaward, an international authority on the subject, described his various ploys to get at lichen. Once when examining a garden wall, he was confronted by the householder whom he quick-wittedly told that he was from the Government which was conducting a survey of local walls and their stability. "If you don't hear any more from us," he told her, "you can assume that everything is in good order."

Other arrivals overnight include this Smoky Wainscot above (Update: sorry, it's a Shoulder=striped Wainscot; many thanks Dave. See his Comment for interesting point about hook-tips too) and the very pretty Miller Moth below. It does rather look as though it has been working with bags of flour.

Finally, as dour old Murray and his much more appealing Spanish opponent Verdasco battled away, so did these two pigeons on our local telegraph lines in my little film below, which I hope works on your computer. They made such a racket that I stopped weeding our beetroot and went over to investigate. Is it male rivalry? Or passionate love? Does anyone know what they are up to?

Cabbage patch

The British vegetable gardener can expect to find two things among the brassicas at present: caterpillars and small shards of blue and white china. Here they both are: a bird's dream meal on part of a plate, albeit amid our radishes rather than the broccoli.

The china is one of the nation's great mysteries. Wherever you dig in a garden, from John O'Groats to Land's End, you will find a scrap. Was there some great mass jingoistic plate shattering during, say, the Boxer Rebellion between 1899 and 1901?

The caterpillars are more explicable; a large number of butterfly and moth larvae like the vegetables as much as we do. Me, I am torn between wanting plenty of the former fluttering around and not wanting hopelessly nibbled cauliflowers etc. Update: I've been trying to identify the cattie which I suspect of being a Green-veined or Small White one, but green with a white stripe is this year's (and every year's) top fashion for caterpillars, and I remain uncertain. As always. Any help from passing readers much appreciated.

This morning's trap was home to well over 200 moths from which I've selected three novelties for 2013: appropriately, the first is a Barred Straw with its highly unusual resting position which is shared only by the very similar-looking Spinach Moth. Inappropriately, the latter's caterpillars eat black- and redcurrants rather than spinach,  but I'm OK with this because they like the leaves more than the fruit.

Finally, two moths whose names are self-explanatory: a Blood Vein and (snuggled with a Flame Moth) a delicate Light Emerald, the latter one of a group of slightly larger, slow-flying moths which flit around the garden at twilight, like benign ghosts.

A hitchhiker's guide to the moth-ery

I haven't seen this before: a moth so brazenly choosing to perch on another, like a stowaway on an aircraft, or indeed a spare fuel tank at the tip of a jet plane's wing. I must settle down and identify the micro involved. Its host is one of the Elephant Hawkmoths which come every night to the trap at the moment.

We didn't get as far as take-off because my camera strap slipped and flicked the passenger off; a shame, because I would like to see how long the little moth managed to cling on as the bigger one whirred its wings in readiness for flight. Considering how many moths arrive at the moment, it is also interesting how few cuddle up together like this, apart from the 'Everyone wants to snuggle with a White Ermine' phenomenon mentioned a couple of posts back.

There are lots of familiar faces among the eggboxes at the moment, such as the Spectacle above (with genuinely rose-tinted specs if you look closely) and the Pebble and Pale Prominents shown below. I was also pleased from the colour palette point of view to see the Brimstone moth which follows; but yellow isn't its only attraction.

Look closely and you'll see a pair of blue eyes, as appealing as those in Thomas Hardy's novel of the same name. I've zoomed in as close as I can and I hope you like the results.

Lobster potting

Today's most exciting moth was hiding outside the trap and I wouldn't have seen it in my greener days. It's a Lobster Moth, a name that unites two completely different kinds of creature in a way which may initially seem surprising. You only gradually absorb the pinkish/russet tone to the trailing edge of the forewings, folded along the back.

The patterning makes good camouflage with the moth resembling a couple of leaves when at rest. It lives in woodlands and likes ones which are well-established. New plantations seem to hold less attraction for it, even when its caterpillars' varied diets of hazel, birch, oak and beech are present.

A cinnabar - and my pyjamas - for scale

I was alerted to this one's presence in the scan of surrounding foliage which I now carry out as a matter of course. Contrary to all best practice in camouflage, the narrowly-angled 'jet-plane' wings were poking out from under a leaf, a sharp, unexpected shape in contrast to the soft greenery all around.

I took this slightly blurred photograph but then - eek - my 'battery low' sign started flashing. I risked one further picture with the leaf turned up but the camera went dead. Had this been a smaller moth, that would probably have been it, because they are far more jittery and easy to wake in the morning. And I would have been sad because although this moth is not rare in southern England, I have never seen one before.

Waking up at last, and widening the angle of its wings

And finally on the move, before I hid it and its leaf under a bush to go back to sleep

Luckily, the Lobster snored on while I took the camera in for a five minute recharge, and I managed the other pictures before the red light started winking again.  Here to finish with, is a real lobster courtesy of www.hospitalityinfocentre.co.uk so that you can ponder the comparison for yourself.

Update: Dave in Comments quite rightly picks me up for not mentioning the Lobster Moth's caterpillar whose bizarre appearance accounts for the species' name, with the adult's colouring a secondary factor. Check out the picture below, courtesy of the enjoyable Creepy Animals blog, for its full peculiarness. To adjust the famous poem about the purple cow:


I've never seen a Lobster 'cat'
I hope one day I'll see one
But I can tell you firmly that
I'd rather see than be one.