I shall go cross-gartered

Last night I put the trap in a corner of the garden which seems to be the favourite meeting place of Common Swifts, pretty little moths with variable markings and a pronounced quiff of hair like Tommy Steele's.  He was my pop hero when I was small, especially when I spent a week in Leeds General Infirmary after shooting an arrow into the sky with my home-made bow and watching it come all the way down until, Harold-like, it hit me in the eye. The boy in the bed next to mine was an Elvis Presley supporter and our vigorous battles definitely helped my full recovery.

At the risk of diverting wildly from moths, I must just add that I was discharged three days before Christmas, to my great regret. Why? My home was happy and loving, but you should have seen the pile of presents donated by kind-hearted souls and institutions to the children's ward. If you weren't there at Christmas, you didn't get one.

Anyway, above are three differently marked Common Swifts from the dozen or so in the eggboxes. The species is reckoned to be 'primitive' by the moth authorities because it has no means of eating and therefore cannot live long. Yet its pre-adult life cycle lasts for two years, with the caterpillar pupating and spending two years underground.

I've featured the smartly-dressed Muslin moth twice here in the last week and this morning there was another one in the trap and a second lying casually in the nearby grass. The latter's languid stance reminded me of yesterday's White Ermine moth and the pictures are usefully compared to see how these two species - very different from above or at a casual glance, are related. They share the same spotted and dotted bodies - and look: while complementing the Muslin moth on its tasteful appearance, I quite forgot to mention its startling yellow leggings. Veritably the Malvolio of the tribe.

Lordy, lordy

A common but very beautiful moth arrived this morning, appropriately at a time when various politicians defeated in the General Election are receiving offers of peerages as a consolation. (To their credit, four of the leading and much-missed Liberal Democrats have turned this down.) It is the White Ermine, whose patterning much resembles the ermine lining sewn on to the red robes worn by members of the House of Lords.

The moth gets darker as you travel north in the UK and in Scotland its forewings can sometimes actually be brown. But here in Oxfordshire it is either pure white or sometimes white with a creamy tinge, as in the goldtop milk which our granddaughter consumes happily, to my great envy.

This one struck an apparently relaxed, cchaise-longuish attitude when I tapped it out of the eggbox in which it was nestling. But when I prodded it to turn it over, it scuttled into a crack in the garden wall which defied my efforts at focussing the new camera. (I have discovered buttons which turn pictures sepia and the like, but what I really want is sharper focus).

That would enhance the next two pictures of a Shuttle-shape Dart couple, the male lighter-coloured and female the darker, rather Puritanical-looking one. Obvious differences between the sexes are common in moths and often prompt me to wonder whether animals can distinguish between men and women by sight, should they want to. I would guess that it's harder and that sound and others senses may play a laregr part (assuming always that animals have any reason for carrying our this exercise. Could it have any part in the survival of the fittest? Are women more inclined to scatter breadcrumbs, for instance, or give in to purred requests for catfood?

Finally, we have a handsome moth of the 'kidney mark' variety whose identity I hope establish before night comes.

A very old friend

It rained all day yesterday, in a slow, steady manner which as children we used to call 'Venusian' after reading some pseudo-scientific book which suggested that the weather was always like that on Venus. But at dusk it stopped and I was hoping for interesting visitors in the trap overnight.

In the event, apart from a Spectacle moth, half-a-dozen Flame Shoulders and five Maybugs, there was only this, a Heart and Dart. Common enough, but I have a soft spot for it because it featured in my 12th-ever post on this blog, back in June 2008.  Here's the picture I took then which shows the 'heart' part better than my one this morning.

And this is what I wrote then:

Rain last night, so no trapping. Instead here's a language lesson and another competition. Chatting with Cheryl about 'psyche' the dual classical Greek word for 'spirit/soul' and 'butterfly' (see Comment on immediately previous post) got me thinking about Indonesian. The Indonesia for butterfly is kupu-kupu. The Indonesian for moth is kupu-kupu malam. But kupu-kupu malam literally means 'butterfly of the night' and is also slang for prostitute. I know this because I once collected moths in Sulawesi (formerly Celebes). Oh, how knowledge-packed blogging can be. Now the competition: look at the wing patterns of this moth (currently a nightly visitor in Leeds) and guess its name. I'll help with the clue that it's called the Blank-and-Blank and the two Blanks rhyme.


Guesses included the excellent 'nail and pail', 'blot and dot' and 'wings and things' and I also had a comment from the owner of a New York soap shop called... Heart and Dart.  I'm not sure if it's still running, but hope so. There's an online reference to it here.

Happy nights are here again

Hooray! A second warmish night has brought lots of good things to the trap which was also positioned in idyllic circumstances. It's our wedding anniversary today and, in exchange for a dew-fresh posy of everything I could find early this morning including purple-sprouting broccoli flowers, Penny gave me a lovely card entitled 'Through honey-scented thickets'.

A honey-scented thicket was the home of the lamp, a little pool of fresh grass surrounded by lacy cow-parsley which in the evening especially gives off a marvellous scent. Here are some of the night visitors attracted by that and by the lamp (although the issue of whether they are really attracted by the latter, or rather distracted, is one which has been much debated here and remains unresolved).

The top picture, which reminds me of the solitary Spitfire in the Battle of Britain flight deployed at the VE Day celebrations (they once flew over our house when we lived in London, sounding like 1000 badly-tuned lawnmowers) is that excellent creature the Lime-speck pug. It could as well be named the Bird-dropping.

The sceond picture shows one of a couple of that handsome moth, the Common Swift, and the third is a Bright-line, Brown-eye - not to be confused with the Brown-line, Bright-eye which flies later in the Summer. Then we have a Treble-bar and - below - two sections which will be familiar to regular reads: (a) two macro-moths yet to be identified by yours truly though I realise the second one is one of the many and baffling Pug tribe, and (b) three micromoths ditto.

Update - thanks to Ben in Comments: a worn Powdered Quaker

Update - thanks to Ben again - an Oak Tree Pug

Update: Ben ticks off all three micros: first Agonopterix arenella

Then Elachista apicipunctella

And lastly Celypha lacunana - all three veterans of last year but, alas, my recognition skills are disastrous

Finally, here are a couple of photos to conceal from the eyes of anyone even mildly insectphobic. The first is of a couple of other visitors to the eggboxes last night: a slumbering wasp and a Maybug - the latter harmless in spite of its fearsome appearance)...

...and the second an extraordinary picture taken two days ago in London's Homerton by my niece Annie. As her Mum enquires in an email: what happened next..?

Would you eat needles?

The blackbird was up to its window antics again this morning but I bustled past to the moth trap, confident of better things after a warm night. I didn't turn the light on 'til gone ten but there was still a nice variety of visitors dozing away.

Here they are: a distinctively-shaped Small Waved Umber, above, and the delightfully patterned little moth the Pine Beauty, below.

The latter's caterpillar lives off pine needles of which there are plenty in the pub garden next door. But what a diet! It reminds me of the poem composed in the 1920s, rather callously during a time of food shortages in the fledgling Soviet Union:

On Nevsky Bridge a Russian stood

Chewing his beard for lack of food.

He said: "This stuff is hard to eat

But a darn sight better than Shredded Wheat."

It has never been my favourite cereal either.

Returning to moths, the rest of the tally coincided closely with the most popular arrivals currently on that outstanding website for baffled moth-identifyers, Hants Moths Flying Tonight. A Poplar Hawk consorted with three Maybugs, a Brimstone moth lit up the dark bowl of the trap with its sulphurous yellow and a Shuttle-shaped Dart (left) shared an eggbox with what I think is a Heart and Dart (below), the latter pair new to the garden this season. Update: But hang on a minute...



I'm going to check that one with the experts on the Upper Thames Moths blog, or Ben or any other of the equal-experts who kindly keep me in order via Comments here. Ditto this Footman moth of some kind. But which? Update 2: all is revealed, thanks to Ben and Trent in Comments here and Martin Townsend on the UTM blog. The 'Heart and Dart' is a worn Hebrew Character and the footman is a worn Orange Footman. Very many thanks to all.

Finally, I was made happy by the appearance of another of the Prominent moth family which rest so sleekly, looking like cats either trying to hide or preparing to pounce. Here it is below, an Iron Prominent, followed in conclusion by proof that the camera does lie. My final picture is of a male Muslin Moth, as featured a couple of posts ago. The previous photo showed the species' drab grey colouring accurately. This one, with the lens perplexed by the gloom of the trap bowl, has greatly softened the colour. Beautiful, but  misleading.

Can blackbirds have two wives?

I popped the above question into Google this morning after watching a convocation of blackbirds doing curious things outside the house. I was late back from Leeds last night and Penny told me that strange knockings at intervals during the day had alerted her to a blackbird repeatedly fluttering at a window by the bird feeder. Not crashing into it as birds occasionally do with fatal results, but appearing to attack it while trying to hover like an inept young kestrel.

Sure enough, as I made the tea this morning, I heard scuffles and bangs and there was the bird behaving just as P had described. I haven't yet got a picture or filmlet of it but will post one here if I do. But I saw that it was a female (pic below, apols for the poor quality of my bird photography) and, while I watched, she was joined on an endless forage for food on the lawn and shrubs by a male and two other hens.

Hence my question, which has yet to be resolved as my brief foray on Google only turned up lots of stuff about American novels with 'blackbird' in the title plus references to the Beatles' famous lyric 'Blackbird singing in the dead of night...'  On which score, you may be interested to note a reference to the Fab Four in the blackbird's manifesto for the recent vote on Britain's national bird.

This is generally assumed, including by me, to be the robin, which won the last such vote back in the 1960s. But it may be toppled from its perch after the poll of a shortlist of ten which was held appropriately on the UK's General Election day last Thursday.  The counting process isn't quite as swift as local authorities'. Some 213,000 people have voted which is impressive, but the result will not be disclosed until June.

Here's the blackbird's manifesto from a nice piece in my old paper The Guardian. You can read all its rivals' claims here.

The black bird is expected to make a strong push, relying heavily on the “Beatles effect”.

Nature’s Home editor Mark Ward said a vote for the blackbird was a vote for joy.

“That’s why you should vote blackbird – for no other reason than it being the bird that makes you smile. And who doesn’t need more smiles in their life? Whether you live in town or city, you don’t have to look hard to share some precious time with a blackbird. Vote for your favourite neighbour. Vote blackbird - and smile.”

The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds' website meanwhile observes:

Blackbirds tend to be solitary birds. Small feeding and roosting aggregation sometimes form at good sites, but there is no proper social interaction. 

And finally, I noticed that the window in question gave a very good reflection of me when I pottered past en route to the moth trap (which contained only five Flame Shoulders, the Clouded Drab below, a bee and a slug, hence all this stuff about birds). I suspect the blackbird has noticed its reflection and fears that yet another bride is hoping to move in.

Contemplatives

Let's think of this chap as a wise old soul contemplating the election results. What he is thinking, I cannot tell, but I do envy him those antennae - one of the few animal characteristics I'd like to see added to the human form, along with the ability to fly (without large wings which would always be getting in the way).

I say 'he' because I can do so with certainty. This is a Muslin Moth and the female is a lovely, pure white. She also shuns the light of traps. Instead she may be seen during the day, scuttling about. Probably shopping.

Only four other moths in the eggboxes last night: two Flame Shoulders, a Swallow Prominent and this newcomer for the year, a Pebble Prominent, named after the two pebbly-looking marks on its neatly-folded forewings. He (or she) is looking thoughtful too.

X marks...

I was hoping to bring you an election moth yesterday but rain dashed that. Last night, however, while all the Xs on the ballot papers were being counted, a moth with an X on its back obligingly flew in. It's the Lychnis above, a handsome insect although carefully neutral in its colouring.

The trap's equivalent of the currently rampant Scottish Nationalists was the Swallow Prominent. Five of them - four shown above - formed a clear majority over two Nut-tree Tussocks, two Hebrew Characters and a couple of Flame Shoulders, one below, a new species for the year for me.

The re-election of Caroline Lucas, the UK's sole Green MP and a hard constituency worker down in Brighton, was meanwhile honoured by this pretty little Green Carpet, another 2015 newcomer.

Finally, the eggboxes contained a couple of those alarming-looking but loveable creatures, the darling Bugs of May. BBC Radio is currently having a Kafkafest including a programme which, somewhat tweely, discusses which insect Gregor turns into in Metamorphosis.  I reckon he looked pretty much like this.

Name game

We took a good friend for a lovely walk yesterday. Good in the sense that she's done much public good, but special to us because she brought us together, and can thus claim quite a share of responsibility for happiness, children, granddaughter and other excellent things.

"There's a butterfly with orange tips," she observed as we strolled along a woody ride. "What do you think it's called?" Penny and I asked. "Orange Tip?" she guessed.

Back at home, the moth in the top picture caught her attention as we examined another sparse haul from the trap. "It looks as though it's wearing specs," I said. "What do you think it's called?" "The Spectacle Moth?" she replied.

An intelligent person therefore as well as a good one.

Last night meanwhile saw me put the trap out very late and there was also a wind blowing, even though the weather has turned much warmer. This morning brought a mere three moths but they included this lovely little Carpet, topside above, lowerside below. A Red Twin-spot, I think.

The other two were a Hebrew Character - a name drawn from its prominent marking resembling the Hebrew letter Nun which also intrigued our friend - and this one below which I am guessing to be a Clouded Drab. A blameless creature, but (as regular readers know) I find their lack of distinctive colouring or pattern annoying.

Fast breeder

The nights remain chilly and catches thin, but there were a couple of nice moths among the eggboxes this morning. The Brimstone, whose eponymous butterfly pal is very common round here during the daytime, brings a welcome splash of bright colour to the rather understated palette of most UK moths.

Quite by chance, a little seed in the box shares the buttery yellow and brown of the moth in my picture, above. Don't worry, it isn't a bit of the insect that's flaked away. The Brimstone will cheer me up for the rest of the summer. Relatively unusually, it has at least three broods before October. Another curiosity of its entry in the Moth Bible is a reference to its caterpillars feeding on - among many other things - the Wayfaring Tree. Better known as viburnum, this is not one for you and me to nibble. The fruits cause diarrhea and vomiting in weedy old humans.

The other agreeable moth was this Common Quaker in very good condition and there was also a Brindle Beauty, a tabbycat of a moth, and four Hebrew Characters. Meanwhile, here's a close-up of two of my Emperor Moth cocoons which - pace yesterday's post - seem set on slumbering for another year. Note how soil and even a small pebble have been woven in as camouflage and armour, assisting the row of spikes around one end of the cocoon to deter predators.