May the force be with them

George Lucas drew from all manner of sources for his galaxy of creatures and machinery in the Sar Wars films. I bet that moths were among them.  I mean, doesn't this Pale Prominent look like something with not nice intentions towards the Ewoks and Luke Skywalker?  It's an extraordinarily constructed moth.

Its evolution may well come down to resembling a flake of wood, but it's the curious refinements which fascinate me. That black-topped mohican half way along its body, for instance. How has that helped the PP's fitness to survive?

Survive it does, a common moth if seldom seen by most of us, with thriving colonies as far north as Scotland's Great Glen. I am going to be in the latter in a few weeks' time but, alas, there won't be room in my suitcase for the moth trap.

An unexpected leaf

 

I was singing the praises of buddleia the other day, as the only one of the various plants advertised in garden centres as 'butterfly bushes' to live up to the name. But although I am used to Red Admirals, Painted Ladies, Commas and the rest of the usual gang feeding voraciously on the purple fronds, I would never have expected to find this character, above.

Assuming that you have been reading carefully, you will recognise it as a Leaf Butterfly, Kalima inachus, which featured on the blog two weeks agao when we took some Sri Lankan friends to Blenheim Palace butterfly house. I described then how a local butterfly enthusiast had spotted another exotic, the Blue Diadem aka Hypolimnas missipus, nectaring on hanging baskets in Blenheim's neighbouring townlet, Woodstock. Well this Leaf Butterfly is another bold escaper.

Its finder was a very nice friend of ours who lives just up the road and is the local butterfly recorder. What a coincidence that the Leaf should choose her buddleia? No. She is both knowledgable enough to spot it, in spite of its excellent camouflage, and she has the ability to look for butterflies, and other wildlife, which so many of us do not. Hence the widespread misapprehension that there aren't any left, but I won't jump on to that hobby horse again.

The picture above shows the Leaf spreading its entirely different and impressive topwings; as opposed to the camouflage, these are a 'shock' defence like the familiar British Peacock butterfly's 'eyes'. Flashed open, they have the effect of alarming a predator for just long enough for the butterfly to escape or hide.

The butterfly house staff were surprised and delighted when our friend returned the Leaf to them in a margarine cartoon, perfectly well after its two-mile wander on the loose. When you leave the greenhouse, they ask you to check your back in a mirror in case one of the occupants has hitched a ride. But a few still manage to escape.

And now, at last, moths...

This glider-like flying object is the White Plume, a particularly delicate member of a lovely family of micromoths which hold their wings out in the shape of a T-shirt. Here are some pictures, and you may well find the actual moth if you potter along a hedge or lane bordered by bindweed. White Plumes are easily disturbed by day.

Because of all the butterfly excitement, I didn't have time to investigate these other features of the eggboxes. Appropriately, they are eggs. At least the ones in the first picture are, with one of them looking as though it has either hatched or been raided by a sharp-beaked predator.

The second looks like some sort of protective covering for a cluster of mini-eggs, albeit sadly not the Cadbury's kind.  Let's hope they hatch successfully in due course (while my remaining Emperor Moth cocoons snooze peacefully into their second autumn of hibernation).

Further reasons for butterfly cheer

I'm building up a backlog of moths at the moment because of my sudden interest in butterflies, but no matter; the butterfly news just gets better and better.

Further to my last post, I've now established that our skipper, or skippers, is/are the Small Skipper and/or the Essex Skipper. Thanks to advice from the eminent Wendy Campbell who runs the Upper Thames Butterfly Conservation butterfly sightings page, I have been on my hands and knees cooing to a variety of these jumpy little insects to stay still for a moment while I photograph them.

Two women out walking this morning found me thus occupied. We parted on merry terms and I asked them to look out for skippers with black ends to their antennae. This is the best way to distinguish the Essex from the Small, although it is no easy task. Nor am alone in my bafflement. The Essex Skipper was only established as a separate species in 1889 and was thus one of the last to be added to the definitive UK butterfly list.

Here are some pics, which took a lot of getting so far as crispish focus was concerned. I think the insect in question, which was astonishingly patient for a skipper, is an Essex. I have also included a sadly blurred pic of what I suspect of being a Small because in spite of the rubbish focus, it looks as though the ends of the anetannae are definitely brown, not black (above and left).

A bonus to the curious way of spending the morning was that I notched up TWO MORE local butterflies: a Small Copper (my previous weekend sighting of this species was on Port Meadow in Oxford) and the Brown Argus, which I discovered today by accident. It's actually the butterfly whose photographing I described yesterday at inordinate length, when I called it a female Common Blue. 

This morning, I photographed the tiny butterfly below and was full of glee, thinking that it was a Small Blue because of its minute size. But no; it is a female Common Blue. In the process of checking, I noticed the difference between the orange spots compared with yesterday's butterfly and - Bingo! - my sadness at 'losing' the Small Blue from my list turned to joy at the adding of the Brown Argus. 

I hope you managed to follow all that...

Update: I'd just posted this and gone outside with a cup of tea for Penny when, lo and behold, more good news. The one butterfly which eluded my camera over the weekend was the Holly Blue. I've posted pictures of our garden ones on the blog previously, and I had three good sightings on Sunday, but they are often extremely jump and also inclined to soar away above the trees. Today, thanks to Penny's activities, I had a lovely little poser. It was so busy sucking up the minerals from Penny's freshly distributed and very rich compost, that it didn't even notice me. Yippee, the full set.

All this has added to my general cheerfulness about the current state of UK butterflies, which is also borne out to a degree which surprised me by the very good website of Butterfly Conservation.

They note the 'distribution trend' for most species since 1970, and here are the percentages for those on my local list:

The winners:

Essex Skipper: Plus 46 percent
Comma: Plus 37 percent
Holly Blue: Plus 36 percent
Painted Lady: Plus 32 percent
Speckled Wood: Plus 31 percent

Red Admiral: Plus 25 percent

Peacock: Plus 17 percent
Ringlet: Plus 16 percent
Brown Argus: Plus 16 percent
Marbled White: Plus 11 percent

Small Skipper: Plus 4 percent

The losers:

Brimstone:  Minus 43 percent
Small Copper: Minus 16 percent
Common Blue: Minus 15 percent
Gatekeeper: Minus 12 percent
Small and Large White: Both minus 7 percent
Meadow Brown: Minus 4 percent
Small Tortoiseshell: Minus 3 percent
Green-veined White: Minus 1 percent

I'd comment on these figures (a) that the three Whites are doing brilliantly, considering that they are the subject of a permanent and understandable assault from vegetable gardeners; (b) the Brimstone, as Butterfly Conservation notes, has spread its range significantly in the last two decades; and (c) note how the Pluses are mostly a lot bigger than most of the Minuses.

Result: happiness.

Doesn't come butter than this...

After the drabness of yesterday's moths, here's an explosion of colour for you - the result of a happy day spent truanting among the butterflies. Much as I love moths, who can deny the glorious beauty of their daytime relations? I marvelled so much at the Common Blue above that I almost neglected to take its photograph while its wings were still obligingly spread.

Likewise this second or third generation Brimstone. What an exquisite creature! It is impossible not to gush about the loveliness of these insects. But there was a serious side to my little project.

I had lunch on Friday with a group of eminent Oxford gents whom I meet occasionally and when I told them that my bike ride down the canal towpath had been ablaze with butterflies, they replied in unison: "But didn't you hear the item on the Today programme?" Oh gawd. Yet again, the summertime media has come up with a butterfly-doom story. To my mind, it's cobblers.

I didn't have to go hunting for any of the butterflies shown in this post. They were simply there; quite a few of them, as you can see, on our buddleia. Not for nothing is this lovely, easy-to-grow, honey-scented plant known as the 'butterfly bush'.  As well as the Red Admiral and Peacock shown above, it played host all day to troupes of Commas - particularly numerous this year, Small Tortoiseshells and the immigrant Painted Lady.

The first of the Painted Ladies which I spotted, shown above, had clearly been around a bit, but later in the day, half a dozen specimens in excellent condition were flying powerfully around. I was pleased to get this picture, below, of the tatty Painted Lady with a hoverfly or bee. There are plenty of the latter around too, getting drunk on the nectar wafting from wild as well as garden plants.

Here's one of the many Commas, next, showing its dramatically serrated wing shape, like the peninsulars of south-west Ireland or the fjords of Norway.

And here's another, just to show its fine, fritillary-like, russet topwings:

And here's the last of the common 'Vanessids', the brightly-coloured stars of the UK's butterfly summer, a Small Tortoiseshell, seen from below which gives only a hint of its glorious upper wings. Sorry.

I didn't hang around for a different shot because I was keen to get hunting with camera in the field next door which has a well-planted rim of trees on most of its circumference along with dense hawthorn and blackthorn hedges. A little earlier in the year, Marbled Whites are common here, fluttering around like a mixture of chess and Quidditch. I thought I was too late for them, but there on a grass stalk was one waiting for me.

Just before I left, I clocked up the three 'cabbage whites', the Small White on our spinach,

the Large White on our rhubarb, 

and the Green-veined White - comfortably the commonest of the three in my experience - on some brambles. Cabbage whites are derided and understandably disliked by vegetable growers, but they are delicately patterned when you look at them closely. The soft greys of the 'Green'-veined White's underwing are a delight as well as a lesson in the way the human eye interprets colour.

I knew that on the field edge I would find Hedge Browns and Meadow Browns and both were abundant, the former especially. Here are two on that noble plant, ragwort, obligingly showing their upper and lower wings.

Here's one of the Meadow Browns:

Speckled Woods fluttered around the shadier parts of the paths, many intent on courtship

and here's a bonus which I'd hoped for but wasn't certain of finding; a Ringlet, prettily-eyed and prettily-named. There were quite of few of these about as well.

Skippers jinked around the thistles and other flowers and there may have been more than one type on the wing. I think these are both Large Skippers but I hope to back again today to have a longer look and take less blurry pics.

I have also seen Common Blues on the field edge in previous years and, with that sense of excitement which luckily hasn't left me since schooldays, I was really hoping that they would show up. All at once, I saw the tell-tale flash of colour, and just as quickly, it vanished as the butterfly skipped away. After a tense and stealthy quartering of the immediate area, I spotted it, below. A very worn male, but enough to add to my ever-growing tally.

I needn't have worried. As I rounded a corner into a more sheltered spot - for it was quite windy yesterday and also cloudy for much of the time; not ideal conditions for sun-worshipping butterflies - I came across at least half-a-dozen more. One posed for the picture at the top of the blog which is by far my favourite of today's; a second pottered around like a bar-hopping drinker on a series of flowers.

Then I had my final bit of lucky on a lucky day. A perfect female Common Blue had also spread her wings to enjoy the sun, a much rarer form of resting than the folded wings shown in the photo two above. I turned on the camera and - eek - up came the 'bettery empty' sign. I turned it off, slid out the battery, warmed it in my hands and tried again. Nothing. Muttering prayers and invocations, I repeated this, giving the little terminals a vigorous rubbing. All the while, the little butterfly sat patiently on her grass stem. Click! I took a final photo before the camera died completely. Then she flew away. Second update: Whoops! This is actually a Brown Argus, and thus the 20th species seen over the long weekend (including Monday). See more in next post. I'm as bad at butterflies as I am at moths. :(

Nothing is perfect, of course, and I failed to get pictures of my last two species, a Small Copper and a Wall, which bring the tally for the day to 17.  Update: Famously or notoriously, I cannot count, and the total is actually 18. However, I've been reading up on the Wall and it sounds an extremely unlikely visitor here, so let's subtract that and get nicely back to 17 again. The skippers may also be Essex Skippers and I need to check them out more thoroughly. Back to the camera and the field... To that, because no episode of these long, long saga is truly complete without a moth, I can add this humble dayflyer, the Shaded Broad-bar. Yes, it doesn't really compare in terms of physical charms. But beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

Oh, and here's one of two different hawker dragonflies which were also zipping about both the garden and the field. I just need to find a Holly Blue today to complete my line-up of regulars. Butterfly doom? Bah.

Yawn

The grey, brown, mostly smallish moths have returned to mock me after a few weeks of cheerier arrivals in the trap. They do give me the chance, however, to show how different examples of the same species can be in terms of superficial appearance. The ones above, for example, are all Shuttle-shaped Darts; the ones below are both Dark Arches.

The Common or Lesser Common Rustics are even worse, but we won't go there. Instead, to leaven the lump, here is one of last night's arrivals, a Riband Wave perched on part of the treehouse's thatched roof. I put the trap on the homespun verandah below where it attracted a modest bunch of mothy passers-by. More of them tomorrow.