Listening post

The trap seemed empty this morning, apart from a solitary earwig, until I spotted this. It's the delicate antenna of a slumbering December moth. At least I think that it was slumbering; it is unusual in my experience for moths to sleep with their antennae outspread. Maybe it was keeping half an eye out although it didn't stir while I took several pics.

The paucity of visitors was no surprise. It started raining shortly after I lit the lamp at 6pm and was going at it cats and dogs when I decided to switch things off at around 10.30pm. We are very close to the end of the season now, although last year in Leeds I had a very nice surprise when the Mottled Umbers arrived in late October and swooped off with the title of My Favourite Moth for 2012.

There were still come good things to be had in November, too, but essentially I'm winding down now and will shortly complete a Good Housekeeping audit of the moths which have flocked here for my first year in Oxfordshire. Then it will be time to clean things down and give the trap, myself and most importantly the moths, a winter's rest.

The Blandford Fly Guy

No trapping last night because we were far too busy having Guy Fawkes capers, but at least they had an entomological twist. Instead of the traditional guy we topped the bonfire with an effigy of our old enemy the Blandford Fly, one of the nastiest little insects to be found in the UK today.

I am not a fan of the Daily Mail but you can read an excitable article from it here about the evil little black beast which will return to annoy us towards the end of next May. Let the pictures here be a warning: we will show it as little mercy as it shows us.

We toasted its destruction last night with a Dorset beer called Blandford Flyer, named after the creature and the fishing fly based on it. Some good comes from all bad, and this is an example.

Lord of the flies

I put the trap on top of the compost heap last night in the wild hope of attracting a passing Death's Head Hawk Moth like the one which flew into a lighted office in Witney in September. No such luck needless to say; instead, the eggboxes were predictably full of flies.

These varied from the gangly supermodel of a Crane Fly (I think - but Update: Toni in comments thinks differently, and correctly I reckon, that this is an ichneumon fly, a noted predator on caterpillars in which it lays its eggs so that its young can munch their way out, yuck. Toni has an excellent website here with a fascinating pic of a lacewing larva as per the comment below. Many thanks T) at the top via the delicate green lacewing (I also think) to the myriad of the little creatures dwarfed by a rather tatty micro in the third picture. Today is a bit of a fly day here; we are having a bonfire tonight and the guy will be not the brave Yorkshireman, Mr Fawkes, but a model of a Blandford Fly, a very nasty little bug which has spread from Blandford Forum in Dorset to these parts.

It has two characteristics apart from an extremely unpleasant bite: it likes clean river water, hence its spread, and the female needs to have a blood meal before mating. The natural world is overflowing with metaphors for angry columnists and other writers, and here is another one for them.

In the world of moths, I can offer you only this worn but still perky (judging by the gleam in its eye) Common Marbled Carpet and an interesting Black Rustic with a deformed left wing. The Black Rustic which came on Wednesday night had the same feature. I left it sleeping in the luxury pink eggbox by our front door, about 50m from the compost heap, but I think that it must be the same moth. Other overnighters amounted to one Sprawler, two Feathered Thorns and a single November Moth.

Spooky

The moth trap had some unorthodox competition last night from our Jack O'Lantern, above and below, which succeeded in attracting, not moths but trick-or-treaters, a very nice and alarmingly-disguised family from Lewes on a week's narrowboat holiday on the Oxford Canal.

I like trick-or-treating, Mischief Night, Guy Fawkes and all such customs because of the mixture of fun and genuine history and tradition involved - theology even; the temporary fling of 'evil' before the dawn of All Saints is a very venerable belief indeed.

I know some people don't like the doorbell ringing unexpectedly after dark and I sympathise; but the answer is easy: anyone up for it like us should carve and display a pumpkin. That's what brought the family to our door. They were politely choosing only houses where Hallowe'en had some recognition.

My own tradition on the night is to type 'moth' and 'pumpkin' into Google and see what transpires. Last year it was a YouTube clip of a kitten called Pumpkin batting away ineffectually at a passing moth. This year, I'm delighted to steer you to the blog of Gallivanting Rockhound, a cheerful geologist and skilled photographer in the US who also helps at a pumpkin farm whose proceeds go to needy families.

The Rockhound took this picture of a hawk moth (or sphinx moth as the Americans call them, more accurately, from the Linnean family name Sphingidae) on a large pumpkin. They needed an ID and I was (unusually...) able to supply it: the Tersa Sphinx,  Xylophanes tersa.  Many thanks to Rockhound for permission to use the pic.

As for the trap, it survived another mild but drizzly night thanks to Mr and Mrs Robinson's illustrious rainshield and was well stocked with interesting arrivals. They included this very smart Sprawler above, one of three, and a nice T-shaped Plume micro-moth whose precise ID I hope to add later.

Then there was a lively Feathered Thorn in appropriately orange, pumpkiny glory, and some familiar - more December Moths in their fur coats, a Black Rustic with its glinting gold kidney marks, an Angle Shades and plenty of November Moths.

Finally, immigrants are in the news with the revelation that the Government's curious 'Go Home' vans with their warning notices to illegal stayers apparently persuaded only 11 people to leave the UK during their summer stint. In exchange, the trap last night welcomed three specimens of our sturdiest immigrant moth, the Dark Sword-grass. Among its many interesting features is an inability over whether to fold its wings this way (left over right):

Or that (right over left):

Furry fellow

We've had the first frost of autumn, plenty of wet and damp and the pleasanter distraction of a weekend in Paris. So when I lit the lamp last night, there'd been an interval of nearly a week and my hopes were high.

They were realised. Two new species for my trapping in Oxfordshire came to call, both very handsome. The furry fellow at the top is the December Moth, a much grander insect than the Jane Eyre-alike November Moth. It belies its name by flying as early as October in the south of the UK. This one has just got here in time to be an October moth.

Next comes the Grey Shoulder-knot. I used to get the December Moth regularly in Leeds but this one - common in the south - is new to me. Isn't it a delight (as is my latest eggbox which tells me all about the hens' owner, one Kitty Campbell).

Finally, the Angle Shades is so photogenic that I can't resist a picture of the one which snuggled down in the trap last night. Other arrivals included a Silver Y, plenty of Red-green Carpets, a Feathered Thorn, several Large yellow Underwings, Red-line and Yellow-line Quakers and a Beaded Chestnut.

Hooray, we are back on the road.

Interlude Parisien; plus a dead but useful moth

Quelle vue de notre fenetre, alors!  It doesn't actually lean. That was me.

The moths have been left undisturbed for three full nights, the last of which saw us at the outer tip of St Jude's Day's reasonably great storm. Luckily this left no trace here beyond a larger number of leaves tumbling than usual and the trap would probably have survived intact, had I put it out.

City of romance
- so what's the
story here?

So it hasn't been the weather behind my long weekend. Non! C'etait a cose de notre premiere visite a Paris avec l'Eurostar. We hooked up with our pals Sarah and Greg Meredith, she the painter extraordinaire who kindly comments here from time to time, and Greg a master of intricate law and wit.

Il n'y a pas de moths a Paris; indeed, even when I Googled 'moth' and 'Paris' in advance, the best I came up with was a Tripadvisor blast at a restaurant where a moth had been found in the salad (a five star recommendation so far as I am concerned. Appropriately, the notion of us eating a moth was stood on its head at the Bateau Mouche station where the floating quay has this spooky sculpture of butterflies finishing off a tasty skull.

Back home, amid the swirls of wind and rain, the ace interior moth-spotter Penny discovered this Copper Underwing sadly dead beside a windowsill potted plant. Sadly for the moth, but happily for me, because it allowed a chance to see if it was a straightforward Copper Underwing or the slightly less common but almost identical Svensson's Copper Underwing.

As with similar 'doubles' such as the Common and Lesser Common Rustic and the Marbled and Dark Marbled Carpet, incontrovertible distinction usually means doing queasy things like anaesthetising the moth with ether or half-freezing it in the fridge and then checking out tricky detail such as claspers for holding on to female moths during sex. A dead moth conveniently allows us to avoid such measures, although rigor mortis can make wing pattern checks a challenge.

One of the differences between the two Copper Underwing species is the patterning on the underside of the underwing - again, usually very difficult to suss on a live moth because these two are among the jumpiest of all the UK species. Here's the pattern on my ex-moth, below, and Richard Lewington's paintings of the two different wing patterns from the Moth Bible.

Here's Svensson, first

And then, below, the standard Copper Underwing followed by a closer look at the real thing on my moth. My exciting orangey red arrow shows the black mark which establishes that this is not a Svensson's.  Now to await any dissenting Commentor, but I hope that I'm right.

Water off a moth's back

The UK Met Office is going through one of its pre-emptive phases, a common phenomenon since Michael Fish and the Great Hurricane Fiasco of 1987.   Its warnings of extreme conditions on Sunday/Monday have been taken up with enthusiasm in the media, notably my mother-in-law's Daily Express which loves weather stories (as I do myself).

Last night's bulletins included warnings of storm outriders in our area, but I am so complacent about the effectiveness of Mr & Mrs Robinson's rain shield that I put the trap out anyway. I'm glad I did because reasonably heavy rain at around dawn duly descended - and provided striking proof of the fact that moths can truck on through such conditions.

The first one featured - ID shortly (Update: I think it's a Dark Swordgrass, an interesting, entirely immigrant moth which may well be muttering about English weather) - was sitting right on top of the rain shield and you can enjoy its raindrops, which stayed put when I transferred it on to an eggbox fragment for pic two - note lively antennae and general air of wanting to get off. The Feathered Thorn in the third picture (one of eight altogether) was on the outside of the canopy, along with the November moth shown below. None were affected by the wet; all three flew off after a little coaxing back to wakefulness.

As with sheep, whose lanolin led to a vast cosmetics byproduct from the sewage works in Bradford during the city's textile heyday, the insects are protected by waterproofing. They can get bashed into submission by direct hits from large raindrops, especially if accompanied by wind. But these are seldom knockout blows. They pick themselves up and dust themselves down and start over, American style (see you soon, Sarah & Greg...).

It was more comfy inside the trap, admittedly, where this Silver Y was joined by about 30 other moths

All of a codpiece

Good to hear the BBC's dome-headed arts guru Will Gompertz using a moth metaphor this morning on Radio 4's today - "The arts world is drawn to money like moths to a flame", he said, accurately. By chance, I also came across the final paragraph of Wuthering Heights this week while reading John Buchan's memoir Memory Hold The Door which itself concludes by quoting Emily Bronte's famous words:

I lingered round them, under that benign sky; watched the moths fluttering among the heath, and hare-bells; listened to the soft wind breathing through the grass; and wondered how anyone could ever imagine unquiet slumbers, for the sleepers in that quiet earth.

I put moths in red, not Emily.

One of these days I must attempt an encyclopaedia of references to moths in global culture, but for now here are last night's visitors to the trap. We are in a season of Red-green Carpets, lovely little moths the size of my thumbnail, whose forest colours of greens and russet would have appealed to Robin Hood.

They often rest in the curious manner of my second photograph, with their tails held high in the air - a position suggestive of codpieces and other ways of emphasising that particular part of the body. Given the prime purpose of their existence - to reproduce - I am sure that there is an element in this habit of signalling to the opposite sex. It occurs with much bigger moths such as the Poplar Hawk and there is a common variant among micro-moths of the entire body slanting up at an angle.

I must get on with other things, so here's a glimpse of other overnighters: a Beaded Chestnut, above, followed below by an Autumnal (I think) and a November Moth (I'm sure), a nice little grey and a ditto brown which await my faltering ID skills - Update: I'm going for a couple of Quakers: a Yellow-line and a rather faded Red-line - and finally a curious mini-caddisy type creature which was little more than the size of a pencil tip.