Tiger, tiger...

Lord of all I survey - a tiger in the Wainwright jungle

I am a sucker for a bit of glamour - people (or in this case moths) bedizening and bedazening themselves to go out, as one of my Grannies used to say. In this gaudy line, it is hard to do better than the Garden Tiger which got most of my attention in the trap this morning.

It is a common moth and one seen fairly frequently flying during the day, as well as the product of the famous 'woolly bear' caterpillar, often seen hurrying across tarmac or lawns on hot days. But our paths have not crossed that much and this is the first I have drawn to my lamp, like many of the species at our moth-crowded new home on the edge of Oxford.

I've lingered on different views of it, thanks to its extreme sleepiness and patience as I tried to to persuade it to show me its vivid underside and body like a bright red wasp's. If you want an example of warning colouration, you could hardly do better, even in a slightly worn specimen like this one which has clearly been about a bit. Birds, keep away!

Go on, play ball

I only finally got the real red after hiding him or her in a hydrangea bush

Close-up of the body, the most vivid part of the moth

Another very warm night brought several hundred other moths to the trap, including another first for me, the Light Arches, and a delicately coloured Small Angle Shades. With the help of the scrap of my pyjamas in the background, can you detect its traces of that very rare colour in UK moths, blue?

Light Arches - lovely feathery wing pattern

Small Angle Shades with its hints of blue mid wing and at the wing edge

Finally, a lovely little micro whose identity I intend to nail over my Saturday morning cup of tea in bed. I hope the weather is smiling on you too. Update after only one cup of tea: I think I have it: Lozotaeniodes formosana, a moth success story. It was first recorded only in 1945 in Surrey but has since expanded to the position where it is rated nationally common.

The Garden Tiger's stylish dress sense earns it a place on the cover of my Moth Bible as you can see here. I am glad that respectable, scientific entomologists share my simple-minded enjoyment of the bigger and brighter moths. Or maybe it was their colleagues at British Wildlife Publishing, who know how to sell books.

Shades of grey

The natural world is unbelievably crowded; the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds suggests that one baby Blue Tit alone eats some 150 caterpillars a day (although the Youth section of their website has this nice little story about one that got away).

If you look carefully, you can find the romantic activity necessary for this fecundity, as in my top picture of a couple of mating Daddy Longlegses. I almost got a snap of two iridescent blue damselfly in similiar flagrante but they flew off (still attached and still presumably in bliss; they have little hooks to secure their fragile union). You can get a bit over-prurient, however. I stealthily took the second picture of what I mistook for a coupling. A you can see, it turned out to be dead, rolled fringes of nettle leaf.

One lovely result of past meetings flutters round Penny and me at the moment in multitudes on our main local walk: scores of graceful Marbled Whites whose chequerboard pattern turns in flight into soft and subtly-changing shades of grey (no pun intended and apologies to anyone brought here by Google and my headline while searching for something else...).

And to end with, another product of insect love. Does anyone know what this caterpillar, found on local ragwort in Oxfordshire, is going to turn into?

Rip van Moth

Do moths buzz about all night like busy human beings during the day? Is their life one of constant nectar-sipping, mating and bat evasion? Not judging by this sleepy Poplar Grey which is my new record-holder for a really long kip.

I discovered it slumbering next to the smart, darker Coronet on the right, plus an attendant micro, when I went out to the trap at around 7am the other day. Normally I'm careful to tuck all the moths out of the way in vegetation after inspecting them, to keep them safe from birds, but I sometimes forget about the ones which have chosen to doze on the trap itself. So when I went back at 8pm to sort the light out for another night, the PG was still there, slightly differently positioned but still dead to the world.

I took another picture, including my fancy Swatch as evidence (although it isn't the easiest thing, telling the time from it). Then it was my turn to sleep; but next morning at 7am, there was the Poplar Grey still in place, though slightly differently positioned again, this time on the holder of Mr & Mrs Robinson's famously simple but effective rain shield for their patent moth trap. Here it is above, with a little micro pal, Eudonia mercurella, keeping it company.

While on the subject of grey moths, I am still trying to puzzle out this last one, which I have provisionally and rather sadly entitled 'Grey Moth'. Is it a Knot Grass? Or a Sycamore? Or, embarrassingly, even another Poplar Grey?

Swanning around

Today's sunlit potter was round a very famous site: Otmoor reserve run with the usual unobtrusive care by the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds. A neighbour took us on an introductory ramble with plenty of stops to photograph the Common Blue Damselfly above (plus its pal or love rival in the background) and the pair of cygnets below.

We also found this Five-spot Burnet (or more probably Narrow-bordered Five Spot which is very similar but commoner) day-flying moth below,  the curious beetle-like creature pictured after that and a couple of fine, plump caterpillars which will turn in due course into Peacock butterflies. They should pupate soon and hatch into adult insects just in time to catch this year's emerging buddleia flowers.

Otmoor has an extraordinary management history; for centuries a communal area used for winter wildfowling, it was enclosed in the 1830s to exceptional fury from villagers in the moor's 'seven towns' who put up one of the fiercest fights on record against the removal of their ancient rights. Attempts at drainage for farming failed twice, first after the enclosures and later in the mid-20th century when the land and floodwater proved unco-operative even in the face of powerful electric pumps.

Now the RSPB is buying up the area as and when it can and restoring it to the wetlands of old (but with no wildfowling allowed). Ironically, the history of glitches continues; the river Ray is so vulnerable to nitrate and other farming pollution that its overflows are kept out of the reserve by yet more pumps and dams, and the meres and scrapes are reliant on rainfall.

Fairy fellow

Put your antennae in...

Curiosities in the trap this morning: first of all, what I take to be one of the 'longhorn' or sometimes more romantically 'fairy longhorn' moths, the Adelidae with their tiny bodies and world champion antennae.  Why such a speck of a creature needs such a sophisticated sensory system is something I would like to find out. Also, what do they do with them when flying?

...put your antennae out...

I can't answer the latter, yet, as my Adela wasn't inclined to fly even when I tipped it safely into a clump of nettles. Update: browsing online over my morning tea, I note that antennae are linked to detecting moths of the opposite sex which may account for the fact that in longhorn moths, the males' equipment is twice or more as long as the females'. There's also a fascinating piece from the University of Washington here, which demonstrates how damaged antennae affect a moth's stability in flight - research conducted by a team constructing flying robots who repaired some damaged moths with superglue.

..in-out, in-out and wave them all about

I was also distracted by this beetle with its curious passengers and the dilemma: are they babies, in which case I'll leave them alone, or parasites, in which case I'll flick them off?

In fact they are neither, or rather they probably qualify as 'benign parasites'. They are spider mites which hitch a lift on beetles without doing them harm, grazing meanwhile on microscopic fauna on their host's carapace. So it was OK that I followed the adage: if in doubt, do nowt.

The Eyed Hawk's eyes are a rare example of 'true blue' whose absence from UK moths I bewailed yesterday

What about moths? Here are some of the daily throng which varies from big hawk moths such as the Poplar and Eyed shown above to the dark form of the Common or Lesser Common Rustic below, and  a new arrival for this year, but one very familiar in Leeds, the Buff Arches with its squiggly Arab-style calligraphy on the forewing.

I think this final one below may be a Large Twin-spot Carpet form thedenii Lampa, but with carpets, I am usually wrong.

Sunbathing

I promise not to write two posts every day but the weather is so entrancing at the moment that a sunny walk is irresistible and every such walk brings a crop of insecty experiences and pictures. Indeed, when I suggested the idea to Penny, she said: "But are you going to be photographing butterflies?" and on hearing that I was, she decided she had things to do at home. The trouble is, each photograph requires quite an exercising in patient stalking, or for the entomological widow hanging about, as butterflies do not doze sleepily in eggboxes like the light trap's moths.

It paid off. The picture at the top for example is a fine Comma, with the second pic showing the curly mark on its underside which gives it its name. This one was intensely territorial, patrolling an area of sunlit hedge and wood periphery less than 20 yards long.

This Small Tortoiseshell had a slightly wider range, jinking about for some 200 yards on the edge of a field of oilseed rape. It strayed even further when a second one appeared and they conducted a love ballet together before going their separate ways.

Next along was this Large Skipper - I think - which zipped around a modest stretch of hedge a few hundred yards to the south of the Comma's beat. You can see it greedily sipping nectar through its proboscis from a bramble flower; ditto on ragwort (lovely plant, ignore the nonsense about it being a 'dangerous' weed) with this Meadow Brown.

Finally, a glittering dragonfly above the River Cherwell; sorry for the slight blurring but it was high up and I couldn't get any closer. Along with Small and Green-veined Whites, which were abundant on my route, all these species are in fine fettle and a rebuke to those, especially in the media, who persist in the dreary mantra that UK butterflies are disappearing.

Clothed all in green-o

Blotched Emerald - not the pleasantest of names but accurate, I suppose

A couple of days ago, there was a very interesting comment here on the blog about the colour purple, linking to a website which described how the great Liberal Prime Minister William Gladstone, who was also a classical scholar, had combed the works of Homer for references to colours and found none at all to blue.

Common Emerald - common but very beautiful when newly-hatched

That is curious when you consider who blue is the defining colour of today's Greek islands, with the wonderfully clear sea, the brightly-painted window-frames, doors and caiques and of course the national flag. But it echoes my own lamentations about the paucity of blue in the colouring of the UK's moths, which I am sure has something to do with the fact that they fly at night. We have no shortage of brilliant blue day-flying butterflies.

Maybe Homer wrote in the evening. That would account for his famous reference to the 'wine-dark sea.'

After blue, my favourite colour is green (and there was an interesting comment on the thread below the Gladstone article which revealed that the Korean language has a word which means both 'blue' and 'green'). We have some lovely green moths and by coincidence - one of the growing number of coincidences on this blog since Penny and I moved to Oxfordshire - they came in force last night.

Light Emerald - this one has only a few more days of green before it will fade to greyish white

The top picture shows a Blotched Emerald, not a very common moth although this part of the UK is one of its strongholds. Then we have three pictures of the Common Emerald, of which there were four in the trap, with its distinctive chequered fringe to the wings which frays and often vanishes altogether with age. Then we have a familiar friend, a Light Emerald (two in the eggboxes) and finally a Green Oak Tortrix, a micro-moth, which was tucked up on a leaf overlooking the trap.

My scales are always a bit naff. The strap button is about half as long as a pencil end

With all these moths, I did a bit of messing about to get a good angle because the green can change to a whiter glow in many conditions, and I also wanted to give and idea of scale - check out the little clasp on the camera's carrying strap.

Green Oak Tortrix - a micro the size of my little fingernail though very similar to a macro-moth I much want to see one day, if only on account of its name - the Cream-bordered Green Pea 

Green is reasonably common among UK moths but has a sadly transient nature. Almost all of these moths which appear in apple-like, bright green glory from their chrysalises fade to white within a few days. The ones peeping at you here are therefore very fresh and newly-hatched. These are their Salad Days.

A Light Emerald on the trap's translucent shield above a Common Emerald on the lawn below

The Green Oak Tortrix with another Common Emerald on a nearby leaf

And just to end off with, in case you are fed up with the colour green, here's the Blotched Emerald again, with a big red poppy in the background.

Skipping along

The brilliant sunshine inspires me to do a second post for today, after a drowsy walk along the canal in Mediterranean heat.  Meadow Brown, Speckled Wood and Small White butterflies fluttered by but apart from a sadly blurred snap of a very worn Speckled Wood, they eluded my pursuit.

I was luckier with these Large Skippers, seen from above and below, which were jinking around on a grassy ride between young trees. One of them led me and my friends to another modest treasure, this Pyramidal Orchid, which among other things is the official flower of the Isle of Wight.

Although essentially a chalk-lover, it has popped up in a wide variety of different places in recent years, especially in the wake of modern development. The most famous example was a colony at Stansted airport which may have cheered up holidaymakers queueing for budget flights.

Last stop before tea and buns at home was at our neighbours whose annual devastation of Solomon's Seal by caterpillars I mentioned in a post on 17 June. Phil Gates of Durham University commented that the beasties were probably Solomon's Seal Sawfly larvae and I promised a photo in due course. Here it is, and they certainly look like the SSS.

Another neighbour came round for a drink and kindly diverted this Cucumber Green Spider, Araniella curcubitina, on his tummy while I fetched the camera. Daytime is as busy as the mothy night just now.