Trouble with traffic

Last despatch from down south: we found this injured dragonfly at Nell's Bridge where an incredibly busy road crosses the Oxford canal between Aynho and Banbury. The contrast between narrowboats pootling slowly along and cars whizzing by is instructive. Dragonflies are great whizzers too, but this one wasn't fast enough. I think that it's a Brown Hawker and it must have been just caught by a car; it was almost able to take off and fly away, but not quite. Let's hope it recovers. I forgot to show you the underwing of a Common Blue yesterday, to complete the series of pics. Here's one on a begonia at Rushey Lock on the upper Thames.

Meeting the Blues

Tadpole was ablaze with butterflies. Reluctantly, I have to admit that the South does much better than the North in this regard. I've known that ever since I was a boy and my cousin Tim in Bristol compiled far bigger lists of species than I ever could. I think it's the same with moths, but the difference is much more noticeable with butterflies, simply because they are more noticeable. The buddleias in the pub garden were quivering with Peacocks, Red Admirals, Painted Ladies and Small Tortoiseshells, often three or more insects on each flower spike. It was the same on a bed of lavender with Large, Small and Green-veined Whites and Brimstones. Best of all, because they are seen more seldom up here, were the Common Blues which jinked out of the way all along the Thames Path to Radstock Bridge (home of yesterday's noble Scarlet Underwing). It was all because the sun was shining. When it goes in, so do the butterflies, on the whole. That is when people start saying: "Oh woe! There aren't as many butterflies as there used to be." They should go and have a drink at Tadpole. Anyway, here's Mr Blue above and Mrs below. Do click on Mr to enlarge because the colour is ravishing. You can see why I'm so sad about the absence of blue in British moths (see quasi-scientific musings in posts below).

Red moth day

Another spectacular birthday moth! We've been celebrating Penny's at a nook called Tadpole on the Thames, and walked upstream to Radstock Bridge, the pretty albeit wasp-infested pub pictured below. We were just celebrating the success of P's decoy, an ashtray with a bit of J2O juice in the bottom which absorbed about 15 wasps, when she said: "Look what's behind the S of Pimm's.' Eagle-Eye, Junior Spy - because there by the end of the red banner advertising the famed summer drink (left in the pic, above the blue narrowboat) was an enormous moth. Only the hawk moths are bigger, among types that come to the Leeds trap. It was a Red Underwing, yo! But as always, it was hiding its red when at rest; only the camouflaged grey and brown pattern of the topwing showed (see right). When I gently tried to coax it on to a bit of paper it flew up and perched on the edge of a Pimm's sun umbrella. It sayed just long enough for the pic above, in which the splash of colour on the underside of its underwing goes nicely with the Pimm's pinky-red. We have got an old picture of a Red Underwing in Leeds, which flew into our garden in August one sunny afternoon about ten years ago (they are regular day flyers). This is the first I've seen since.

The very angry caterpillar

This caterpillar interrupted supper yesterday, and posed an interesting question. Is it a successful example of Darwinism, because it had learned to use our hosepipe as a motorway to cross the jungle (for something its size) of our lawn? Or is it unsuccessful, because I saw it as a result? I am trying to identify it; not as simple as you might expect from something so distinctively marked. Waring, Townend & Co have only a limited number of photographs of caterpillars, so I shall have to roam the internet when time permits. If you have children/grandchildren, or are childlike yourself, now is the best time to watch out for caterpillars. You will often come across 'woolly bears', which are great travellers. They can give some people a mild skin rash, though not me. I also remember finding Drinker moth caterpillars as a child in Herefordshire. They give themselves away by climbing stalks of field grass in the early morning to quaff on the dew. The caterpillar wasn't very angry, as per my headline, but it did roll up in a defensive ball.

Below the radar

Is it a stealth bomber? No, a Willow Beauty. A male one, because it has those fine, feathered antennae, tapering to a narrow tip. The trap attracts a lot of these at the moment and if they land nearby, on almost any surface their camouflage works as well as the Stealth's invisibility to radar. Other abundant arrivals are various Wave moths, smaller versions of the bridal Common White Wave a couple of posts below. They look a bit like the generally much rarer Mocha moths, which include one sounding like a Prime Ministerial hot drink: Blair's Mocha. Dr G.K.Blair of the Isle of Wight was one of the most successful spotters of previously unknown moths; he also discovered Blair's Wainscot and Blair's Shoulder-Knot. The latter provided the BBC with some fun when there was a sudden increase in its numbers near Gordon Brown's Kirkaldy and Cowdenbeath constituency in 2007

Wear of flying

I thought that this was a lacewing at first, so translucent are its wings. But, wading through the assorted types of Yellow Underwing which jam-packed the trap last night (see below), I realised differently. It is a Scarce Silver Lines, not a common moth but one we get here every year, and it's clearly been around a while. I recorded a Green Silver Lines on 2 June and I would guess that this insect has been flying for the best part of two months too. It still retains the vividness of its green on its head, a tribute to the quality of a pigment which in butterflies and moths pinned in boxes is the first to fade. As for the Yellow Underwings - Large, Lesser, Broad-bordered et al... You can see why some people wait until retirement before they take up moth trapping. I estimate that there were more than 500 of them, and it taxes the patience to work through the boxes to see what else has squashed in.
I did notice this season's first Copper Underwing, though, and hope to bring you a pic of one soon. I took one this morning but the moth was tetchy - maybe because of all those common-as-dirt yellow neighbours - and it came out blurred. To be fair to the English weather btw, it was a lovely super-warm August night.

Black and white and green all over

The rain is making trapping too risky, so I am still sitting here pondering the issue of colour and the absence of blue in moths. When I mentioned E B Ford's marvellous book Moths yesterday, I overlooked one obvious point: guess what colour the moths on the classic Collins New Naturalist cover of the book are? Yes, blue. Ford's discussion of the colour issue led me to his even better book Butterflies, which is also a star of the NN series. Discussing colour there, he points out that the 'green' on the underwings of a number of well-known British butterflies is not actually green but an optical illusion caused by 'an intimate mixture of black and yellow scales.' No actual green ones are present. He cites the underwing of the Orange Tip, which anyone can easily spot in April and May, and the Bath White, which you are only likely to see on holiday in countries such as France, where it is common. I thought I'd look at the underwing of the dead Green-Veined White I featured the other day. Sure enough, I think that the 'green' which the eyes register on a quick glance is indeed an effect and the scales are as Ford suggests. As always, a double click zooms things up on your screen although not, I fear, to microscopic levels.

Here comes the bride

Here's a Common (but wonderfully delicate) White Wave for you, with my focussing for once on target. It looks like a bride, albeit one with rather alarming antennae and bulging eyes. Topside above, underview below. Blue is the colour which interests me at the moment, though, rather than white. Olly's birthday comment, two posts below, got me thinking: why I am so pleased by green moths such as the Large Emerald which came that day, when blue is my favourite colour? The answer, which I'd never thought about before, is that there are no blue British moths. One or two, notably the Death's Head Hawk have some vaguely dark bluish bits of pattern; and the Clifden Nonpareil which I would love to see one day, has broad bands of pale mauve like the rose Blue Moon. But there is no real blue. Why? I looked the subject up in my super-Bible, Moths by E.B.Ford, and he says as early as page 6: 'The distribution of these pigments should be more thoroughly studied....and such an investigation would be a delightful task.' That was written in 1955. I wonder if anyone has done the delightful job. I will try to find out and pass their findings on in precis, if so. I suspect that it has something to do with night, since British butterflies (which are scientifically in the same family as moths) have a fabulous range of blues.

Good Housekeeping

Sorry, a rather boring post this morning, unless you are a species distribution monitor. I've found a nice picture of a Common Carpet on some pondweed to top it, but I need a list of the moths (and butterflies) that we've seen here, for reference. Mind you, the names are often as lovely as the moths, as others have often remarked. So maybe there's something poetic about it. Here we go:

Butterflies

Brimstone, Comma, Common Blue, Gatekeeper, Green-veined White, Holly Blue, Large Skipper, Large White, Meadow Brown, Orange Tip, Painted Lady, Peacock, Red Admiral, Small Copper, Small Tortoiseshell, Small White, Speckled Wood, Wall butterfly, White-letter Hairstreak

Moths

Alder, Angle Shades, Angle-striped Sallow, Antler, August Thorn, Barred Red, Beautiful Golden Y, Black Rustic, Blair’s Shoulder Knot, Bloodvein, Bordered White, Bright-line Brown-eye, Brimstone, Brindled Green, Brown China Mark, Buff Arches, Buff Ermine, Buff Footman, Buff Tip, Burnished Brass, Centre-barred Sallow, Chimney Sweeper, Cinnabar, Clouded Border, Clouded-bordered Brindle, Clouded Silver, Common Carpet, Common Emerald, Common Footman, Common Marbled Carpet, Common (and/or Lesser Common) Rustic. Common Swift, Common Wainscot, Common Wave, Common White Wave, Common Yellow Underwing, Copper Underwing and/or Svensson’s C.U., Coxcomb Prominent, Cream Wave, Crescent, Dark Arches, Dark-barred Twin-spot Carpet, Dark Brocade, Dark Dagger, Dark Marble Carpet, Dot, Dun-bar, Dusky Brocade, Dusky Thorn, Early Grey, Early Thorn, Elephant Hawk, Engrailed, Fan-foot, Figure of 80, Flame, Flame Carpet, Flame Shoulder, Flounced Rustic, Foxglove Pug, Frosted Orange, Garden Carpet, Ghost, Gold Spangle, Gold Spot, Golden Y, Gothic, Green Arches, Green Carpet, Green Pug, Green Silver Lines, Grey Dagger, Grey Scalloped Bar, Heart and Dart, Herald, Ingrailed Clay, Iron Prominent, July Highflyer, Knot Grass, Large Emerald, Large Yellow Underwing, Lead-coloured Drab, Lempke’s Gold Spot, Lesser Broad-bordered Yellow Underwing, Lesser Swallow Prominent, Light Emerald, Lime Hawk, Lunar Underwing, Marble Beauty, Marbled Minor, Micros: Barred Fruit-tree Tortrix, Catopria margaritella, Dipleurina lacustrata, assorted Ermines, Garden Rose Tortrix, Mother of Pearl, Plume (Stenophilia sp.), Pyrausta aurata, Scoparia ambigualis, Twenty plume, Miller, Mottled Beauty, Mottled Rustic, Narrow-bordered Five-spot Burnet, Oak Hooktip, Orange Swift, Orange Underwing, Pale Prominent, Pale-shouldered Brocade, Pale Tussock (include dark variety), Peach Blossom, Pebble Hook Tip, Peppered (include melanistic variety), Phoenix, Pink-barred Sallow, Plain Golden Y, Poplar Hawk, Purple Bar, Purple Thorn, Red Underwing, Red-green Carpet, Riband Wave, Rivulet, Rosy Rustic, Ruby Tiger, Rufous Minor, Sallow, Satin Beauty, Scalloped Hazel (include variety nigra), Scalloped Oak, Scarce Silver Lines, Scorched Wing, September Thorn, Setaceous Hebrew Character, Shaded Broad-bar, Shoulder-striped Wainscot, Shuttle-shaped Dart, Silver Y, Slender Brindle, Small Angle Shades, Small Fan-footed Wave, Small Magpie, Small Phoenix, Smoky Wainscot, Smoky Wave, Snout, Spectacled, Square-spot Rustic, Straw Dot, Swallow Prominent, Swallowtailed, Treble Bar, True Lover’s Knot, V-pug (and many other pugs), White Ermine, White-line Dart, Willow Beauty, Yellow-line Quaker.

That makes 19 butterflies and 158 moths I think, although I am not very good at counting. Add in the number of micros, pugs and confusingly similar brown or grey moths which I have not been able to identify, and I think that we can claim over 200 different types. New ones keep arriving, which shows the enormous wealth of Leeds' (and the country's) hidden, nocturnal life.

Best of the Greens

Happiness! I had hoped that something special would arrive on Olly's birthday, and look at this. It's a Large Emerald, the biggest and greenest of Britain's green moths. Anyone who dips in regularly will know my weakness for green, so you can imagine my joy,
specially as I had missed it at first when I gazed at the multitude of yellow underwings in my solitary eggbox and the scrunched up newspapers which I am using while Penny and I eat as many eggs as we can stand, to restock. I went back a couple of hours later to sort out the trap, because it had rained and things were a bit damp. There was the moth, patiently waiting on the outside of the trap's black plastic bowl. Waring, Townsend & Lewington (my moth Bible) say that the species has a habit of coming to light but not entering the trap. How right they are, once again.
The moth was a very co-operative photographic model, and I eventually hid it deep in a creeper, as it had started raining again. Indeed at midday we had hail. Now the sun is out again, although this isn't particularly good news for green moths. Their colour fades faster in the light than any other in the spectrum, although the Large Emerald is known, and admired, for staying greener longer than any of the others.

Orange and lemon

Why are there so many yellow underwings? Although it rained last night, there were well over 150 in the trap this morning. They must feed something; indeed I know several blackbirds which enjoy them occasionally when I fail to hide them well enough after checking the catch. The different types - Large, Broad-bordered etc - far outnumbered the score or so of Dunbars, Beautiful Golden Ys et al which were slumbering beside them.

There was also this lovely little 'yellow overwing', or rather yellow and orange. I think that it's one of the Tortrix micro moths. You can see how small it is by the size of the Yorkshire Post's type, and I've blown up part of the pic further to show you another pair of palps (see two posts below). If you click on it to make it even bigger, it looks like an elongated version of one of those sinister sheep or cattle skulls you sometimes find when out walking.

It's my younger son's birthday today, hooray. I've been trying to find a birthday moth or an Oliver moth but so far have only discovered a YouTube clip online which shows a cat called Oliver having a fight with a moth. Reminds me of a family trip to Nimes where they told us that the Roman provincial administration was so strapped for cash that fights in the amphitheatre were sometimes between sheep, ducks, bees etc.

Playing grand-moth-er's footsteps

I am collecting eggboxes at the moment. The whole family is risking becoming eggbound in the interest of moth trapping. I don't like using the big bowl with nowhere for the insects to creep away and sleep, pending my arrival in the morning. Meanwhile, here are two slightly different views of recent arrivals: I crept up behind the Scalloped Oak (above) to catch the extreme tilt of its body at rest. Does all its blood rush to its head? And you can see from the similar rear view of an Early Thorn (right) why moths can spot you more or less wherever you are. Look behind you! Yes, it is doing. The third pic shows the Thorn from the side, with its characteristic and unusual 'butterfly' way of holding its wings vertically when in repose.

Palpable

Lots of brown and black and grey in the trap this morning. Boring superficially, but when I looked more closely at this Marbled Minor I noticed its palps. Looking like a tiny pair of pliers, they are thought to help moths with touch, taste and possibly movement and navigation. My camera isn't good enough to bring out all the amazing detail in moths' faces, but occasionally aspects strike you like this.

The dead moth in London, for instance, (a few posts below) has its coiled proboscis partly out as you can see if you click on the pic so that it fills your screen. I don't suppose many of us come across the word 'palp' in daily chatter, but it is directly related to 'palpable' which is much more common, generally as an alternative to 'clear' in the sense of obvious although strictly it means capable of being touched. So my various online dictionaries tell me anyway.

Defying the drizzle

A new butterfly for this year, and a sturdy one. The weather's been pretty dreadful and I had just been mowing the lawn half-heartedly in light drizzle when this Gatekeeper fluttered up from some phlox. Then followed a little chase round the garden as I tried to get near enough to photograph it. in the course of that, it was interesting to see how on settling it very rapidly hides its more brightly-coloured forewings and the dull brown and eye-disorientating pattern of the hind ones makes it hard to see among plants' leaves. Without sun, it seldom spreads its wings to bask, but there's a picture of one doing that way back in the blog, on 30 September last year. The name comes from its preference for the fringes of fields, whereas the Meadow Brown (which it much resembles) likes the middle.
Talking of such archives, I looked back through my trapping records (which started in May 2004) and found that an Angle-striped Sallow (see post immediately below) visited the trap in July 2006. Over the years, we have had 19 species of butterfly here regularly. Rather than diminishing, as journalists invariably like to suggest, they have increased both in numbers and actual species. The Speckled Wood, White-letter Hairstreak and most recently Brimstone are among the newcomers. Here's another of them, a Green-veined White, which was easy to photograph by contrast with the Gatekeeper. It was dead. (Sorry, Lorry). I'm still counting the number of moth species. If anyone would like to guess the total, you would be very welcome, and I will immortalise the winner's brilliance in this journal in due course.

Nowhere to hide

An unintentional experiment last night: a trap with no egg boxes for the moths to shelter inside. We got back very late from Gatwick and I forgot that I had dumped the previous, and very tatty, stash of them because they had got wet when I forgot to put the trap away and it rained. In the dark I didn't notice that any incoming moths were just going to have to settle down inside a bare, black plastic bowl - except for these two Dun-bars (No! See Comment from Benny riding to my aid again; they are actually the much rarer Angle-striped Sallow, Yo!), which nicely prove the way that the insects look instinctively for some sort of shelter - in this case the wire from the mercury vapour bulb to a mysterious electrical thing it needs called the choke.

The other moth I've pictured is a Lychnis, a newcomer this year. Alas, I haven't worked out how to adjust the camera to the refection from the black plastic of the bowl and when I tried to tempt the moth to a more photogenic setting, it flew furiously away.

He (or she) should never have left the North

Oh dear, more death. Avert your eyes, Lorry, my kind-heartened colleague who was saddened by my late sparrowhawk, RIP. Still death is a pretty major part of the genuine natural world; even Beatrix P recognised that with her precis of the fate of Peter Rabbit's Dad. Mr McGregor, we name the guilty man. Imagine what Thos Hobbes would have said about life if he had been born a moth.
Anyway, to the point. I'm collecting Penny and her Mum from Gatwick later and I was driving through Regent's Park when this little fellow, or fellowette, flew out from its hiding place in the car and landed on the steering wheel. Hooray, I exclaimed, I am increasing the moth population of London by one. I may also be aiding the spread of species in Britain, something of which I much approve. Some ecologists are rather down on this, as 'artificial', but mankind's activities affect the rest of Nature in so many other ways, that a little moth transporting seems a minor form of interference.

If you click on the picture you can see its tongue and interestingly fluffy tail, as well as the seat-cover detail from our Toyota Prius (smug smirk from writer; no congestion charge, Yo!) But alas. When I reached my son's flat, I forgot about the moth and it wasn't until the next morning that I went to the car (to avoid about £1000 in parking fines) and found its small corpse on the floor. I have emailed Jax to ask what it is, or Benny may know. I put it reverently in a flowerbed in the local park, which appropriately is the converted graveyard of a Blitzed church and it will rise at the Last Trump, or be eaten by a mouse or bird. Unless it was only sleeping (although it might have been eaten then, too).

Creature from my black lagoon

My bee-expert colleague Alison Benjamin (whose book A World Without Bees is a must-buy) tells me that my raided nest (see immediately below) is a bumblebee one; not the big Solitary Bee bumblers which grind about like aerial mowing machines, but a smaller variety. People put flowerpots over them to protect them, she says (making sure that there is an exit hole at the top...) My predator is too big for that, so I've temporarily shielded them with a wheel barrow.

And now - Eeek! - what is this?



A caddis fly in the moth trap, that's what. It's nowhere near as threatening as it appears here, but resembles a weedy-looking moth with transparent browny wings. The life cycle of the caddis is remarkable; the female insect lays her eggs on the the surface of my pond, or just underwater, and then the amphibious larvae build little houses of mud and silt as well as tiny traps to catch algae and microscopic pond life.

They pupate underwater and at hatching time propel themselves to the surface where they struggle free and turn into this. Wonderful! Human birth and life is a pretty arduous experience, but thank goodness we don't have to go through all that.

I've never been a fisherman because my boredom-tolerance threshold is too low, but I admire the way they make and use flies. Here's one modeled on a caddis, courtesy of the website of the English Fly Fishing Shop in Morden, Surrey.

Dig my bees (or rather, don't)

My main preoccupation this morning is with bees. The moths have settled temporarily into a rather dull routine. I am sorry to be unscientific, but my recording enthusiasm fails in the face of yet more assorted Yellow Underwings and small brown species which I can't tell apart. Sorry. All I can manage to keep the moth flag flying is a nice Dark Arches, below, along with one finger and thumb (which, thankfully for the focus, didn't keep moving).


The bees excavated a nest just below one of the pipes through which I covertly draw water from our sloping road's gutter to feed our pond (the thing in the top pic which you may have mistaken for a carrot). We'd watched them fly in and out and rejoiced, amid the almost daily articles about the supposed threat to bees. But then a large animal came along and did some excavation, and this above, is the result. Luckily, I think my pipe has protected the heart of the nest, but it's annoying how Nature can connive at damaging herself. I am trying to find out what sort of bee they are - bumbling in appearance but about half the size of the standard bumble (of which we have plenty).

Away from Home, Part III

Goodness; a tripartite blog, whatever next (this episode goes with the two below). I'm rushing off to Doncaster but had to add this to show my Mum's hunter's eye. She spotted this Light Emerald (No, it's a Common White Wave - see Benny's helpful Comment) by her front door, which has a light of its own. Nothing like as potent as the mercury vapour one in the trap, but if you have an outside light on warm nights, it should attract moths. A propos of nothing, one of my favourite habits when in London is to walk along a street in somewhere posh like Islington after dark, for the sheer joy of triggering the anti-burglar lights, one after the other. It's like being God at the creation of the world. Let there be light! And there were moths.

Away from Home, Part II

And YES! There is a Part II, following on from the entry just below. Mum has surfaced and together we have inspected about 70 moths including these - a Lesser Broad-bordered Yellow Underwing scrutinising us in return (above; I like his skullcap, or is it a Beatle fringe going ever so slightly grey, like mine?) Note the nice green too; you often miss that when seeing 'boring brown' moths like this from above.
Then we've a Snout showing the reason for its name (sorry about the focus, which preferred the leading edge of the eggbox) and a Wainscot, one of about half-a-dozen. On the vaguely scientific front, none of the catch was different from the usuals at home. So it looks as though I need to venture further afield for that.

Away from home

Penny's floating down the Danube with her Mum this week, so I popped over to my Mum's last night and gave the trap its first-ever outing away from home. It's only a couple of miles round Leeds ring road, but it will be interesting to see if the catch is different at all. At the mo, I'm waiting for my Mum to come-to and glug her early morning tea, because she is a natural predator and wants to see the results of the hunt.


The moths are dozing peacefully on the patio. So, I've just photographed a couple which are snoozing obligingly on the outside of the transparent collar; small but exquisitely patterned. I think that the one above is a Marbled Beauty with a slightly tattered Light Emerald behind (No, it's a Common White Wave - thanks Benny - and see two posts above for same bungle by me), and the one below an Engrailed. As you can see, it rained a bit in the night but the trap was protected under a huge umbrella of the rose Mme Cecile Brunner. This may be another ground-breaking post in that there could be a Part II later on, depending on what is lurking among the egg boxes and how much time I have before the Guardian beckons.

Coming to call

This post is going to be a little like the List of Visitors which the local paper published in Harrogate, in the days when the town's spa attracted members of the Upper Ten. The heights of ecstasy were reached when three queens stayed overnight; and I remember doing a touching story about a family who still had a christening spoon given to their grandfather by Tsarina Alexandra, the one shot at Ekaterinburg, when she stayed 'anonymously' with his parents who ran a Harrogate boarding house. No such magnificence last night in my moth trap, but some pleasant visitors all the same. They are, in order from the top: a Shaded Broad-bar; a couple of Scalloped Oaks which look like nuns hastening to the aid of a lost soul (the unidentifiable dark moth in the corner of the eggbox); a Dun-bar (I think) with a Heart-and-Darty-type friend; I shall consult the experts on these, dim as I am; plus a wasp. And, finally, a Burnished Brass with its brass nicely burnished. Sorry about the hesitancies. I wouldn't have been good at telling which queen was which in Harogate, either.