Grandchildren, take two

The grandchildren are back again and the moths are getting used to clambering on to fingers much more delicate than mine. I sometimes get a little impatient with this hobby but wrongly; as the granddaughter points out, the exercise often makes the males show their antennae, their most interesting organ for me, if only because we humans don't have them.

The insatiable curiosity of young visitors also sharpens my ID skills or at least encourages me to make greater efforts, as with the very lightly-marked - worn perhaps? - moth in the picture above whose veining is not immediately familiar to me. This is not a new problem as regular readers well know and it is specially bad at the start of each year's trapping when grey and brown middle-sized arrivals abound. Moire soon, I hopoe, after an internet and Moth Bible browse over morning tea.

I can, however, recognise the beautiful Powdered Quaker above and the Satellite below, although the grandchildren are too young to see the similarity between its tiny flying saucer marks and the aliens we used to shoot down in that early computer game Space Invaders.

Talking of worn moths, here is a very battered Early Grey compared with the scarcely touched Streamer below it, a lovely little moth with an attractive name prompted by the little banners caught in mid-flutter in the middle of its forewings.

Back to the little fingers, this time with their Cambridge Blue nail varnish and hosting a very nice new moth for the year, a Lunar Marbled Brown - the 'lunar' is accounted for by the tiny fingernail-clipping like a sickle moon just discernible on the lefthand side of the broader light band in the wing pattern.

Back to the familiar with this Common Quaker above and a Nut-tree Tussock plus waving antennae - the same as the first-ever visitor to the granddaughter's trap a few posts ago, a satisfyingly pretty debut moth.

Finally two snaps of a frisky Orange-tip butterfly, my second of the year and bringing my year's tally to four after a Brimstone, the Speckled Wood shown in the last post and a fast-flying Comma. 

Slow progress

 

The weather continues to be haphazard and Aprilish, lovely sunny spells followed by showers and downpours and resulting floods, plus some chilly nights. Not a lot of joy from the moth trap therefore, but one highlight was the male Brindled Beauty above with its magnificent antennae.  It was also good to have some rich variety in the abundant Hebrew Character moths which are the most populous of the trap's visitors at the moment. They vary from quite dull, like the one on the left below, to a beautiful mixture of russets as in the moth on the right which I suspect was fairly recently hatched.

Here it is again below with a contrasting Clouded Drab (I hope; as per recent posts, I am very dodgy in my ID efforts with moths such as this one).

Better than all the above, however, was this fine little Ashy Mining Bee, so called on account of its colour and habit of digging holes in patches of open soil.

One of my many great-nieces has also been an observant insect hunter on a visit to her Granny and Grandpa up in Bradford. They spotted a bumble bee leaving this trail - as my sister said, like drops squeezed from a tube of mustard - on the children's swing. Connie's Dad did some Googling and found that 'bees save up their poo all Winter and then go on a cleansing flight and blob it out.'  Well I never.

My butterfly list for 2024 reached three with this Speckled Wood three days ago, coming after an Orange Tip last weekend - too brief a visit to photograph - and the Brimstone two weeks earlier. Penny and I also saw theses different kinds of butterfly on the walls of one of those pricey art galleries in London's Fitzrovia round Charlotte Street. As often previously mentioned, the colours and patterns of moth and butterfly wings have been hugely influential in textile design.

And so to birds and the fun I've been having with our garden's many robins who all want a share of my moths. I ought to oblige them perhaps, since feeding birds is widely considered the main role of moths in the great cosmic round, but it is too callous in human terms not to try to smuggle them away into the depths of bushes. 

Undeterred, another robin mocked us on the day we finished a massive and impressively argument-free DIY of our new fruit cage by treating it as an aviary. He was terrified, however, and I don't think he'll go back in.

Less happily, we saw an horrendous fight to the death between two male Blue Tits, presumably over a mate or nesting site.  Never be under any illusion about the tooth and claw side of the animal world.

Spring Forward

 

As I mentioned at Christmas, my entomological granddaughter was brought her very own mothtrap by Santa Claus. Since then, she has waited with saintly patience for the rain and freezing weather to turn nicer. At last this week it did.

Her first visitors were this very handsome Double-striped Pug, above, still with the russety colouring visible which gives it the scientific name of Gymnoscalis rufifasciata in which 'rufi' is the Latin for 'red.' More predictably, a Common Quaker woke up when she disturbed the eggboxes and crawled inquisitively on to her pyjamas after inspecting her fingertip.  

A second Common Quaker provided a useful lesson in making sure to search the whole trap, as it was hiding sleepily - first picture below -under a rim which overlaps the bowl. My granddaughter was notably delicate compared to her clumsy Grandpa, however, at persuading even a fragile and usually very jittery Common Plume on to her finger. Having moths on her fingers has been an enthusiasm for most of her ten years, the record being five hawk moths on one hand.

The star of the show, though, was a Nut-tree Tussock, a very attractive, medium-sized moth which has yet to pay a call to my own trap this year. It had no hesitation about obliging its captor with a wander round her hand and arm.

After she had gone to school, her younger brother and I discovered a second Double-striped Pug up on the ceiling, almost certainly an un-noticed escapee from the trap. Their parents, Penny and I had brought this in at about 10.30pm the night before when it began to rain and the species is so small that I think it could have found a way under the towel which we draped over the bowl for the night.

There was also a badly-worn moth in the eggboxes, I'm pretty sure a third Common Quaker. And her Mum, who is not a fan of small, fluttery or creepy things but nobly encourages the family to be interested in them, spotted the caddis-fly in my last picture up on the kitchen ceiling and quite possibly attracted in by the house lights, which can often serve as a weaker form of light trap.

An interesting aspect of this debut was my granddaughter's sincere concern for her small, temporary prisoners. Whereas my generation when young had few if any second thoughts about pinning butterflies and moths to form collections of dead insects, her priority is to ensure that they all escape safely back in to the wild after photographs have been taken. It will be interesting to see how she copes with blackbirds and robins once they start to take an interest in what she is doing.

I also pondered, as I sat beneath two lovely cherry trees at school collection time later in the day, how this attitude - pretty general among the young and encouraged by teaching and modern environmental concern, will affect scientific study. Will we miss things through the absence of close examination of dead creatures, or will we form new insights by a more sympathetic approach to their ways? 

Livening Up

The warmer weather has brought more moths both in numbers and variety including the milky Powdered Quaker above and a nice bright Herald below. The latter follows the Spring Usher in raising spirits at the prospect of sunnier times. Hooray!

A third distinctive arrival is this Pale Pinion, next, followed by a tabby-cat of a Brindled Beauty. Just four moths but they nicely illustrate the range of possible arrivals even at this early stage of the year.

Beyond the world of moths, plenty more is going on among the insects, beetles and other small inhabitants of our garden. Ladybirds are beginning to explore outside their hibernation nooks and crannies and I chased the caddis fly, second picture below, for several minutes before it rested long enough for me to see that it wasn't a moth.

Finally, I upended a flowerpot the other day and found this healthy-looking cocoon inside. It has joined three Pale Tussock ones on loan from the granddaughter who craftily gets us to check for emergence every day, rather than doing it herself.

Showy

 

The first showy moth of the year was snoozing in the eggboxes this morning, an Oak Beauty which I transferred to the beech hedge for a nicer backdrop.  No Photoshopping though, after the Royal photo furore. Actually, Photoshopping is a skill, or possibly dark art, too far for me. I confine my interference to cropping. I am tempted sometimes to add 'warmth' or 'saturation' from the iPhone's editing function, if only because the camera's search for maximum lights plays such tricks with the colour anyway. Compare the beech leaves above with those below. There's not a lot in it but to my eye, the bottom photo is a little washed-out and duller and the top one is closer to the colours I saw.

Another welcome dab of colour was the russet of the Clouded Drab below, often a much duller moth than this example. Update: Thanks very much to my two Commentors below who raised doubts about my ID of this, and rightly. And actually my blundering goes further than that. The two moths are different in spite of their similar colouring and considerably more interesting than I thought.  Both Mothwatch and Stewart were on to the possibility of Red Chestnut and Stewart also wondered if the moth might be the rarer White-marked. 

In fact it turns out to be both.

How so? Well, as I promised in my initial reply below, I put the question to the experts on the Upper Thames Moths blog and their skill reveals that we actually have two different moths here. I photographed them at different stages in my examination of the eggboxes but then assumed from their similar colouring that they were the same insect when I looked at the photos quite a lot later while compiling this post. Dave Wilton, the ever-patient webmaster of the UTM blog, wondered first if they were different, suggesting that the first one looked like a Red Chestnut and the second one a White-marked.  Martin Townsend, co-author of the matchless Moth Bible, then confirmed that this is the case.

Thank you all!  And that's a much better result than my original misinformation.

Below the two pictures is an attractive Twin-spotted Quaker, a regular arrival at this time of the year, and following that, a March Moth with its unmistakable zigzags.

The micro below gave me a hard time, as I scrutinised my Micro Bible without success until plumping for a slightly odd example of the familiar Agonopterix alstroemeriana and putting that suggestion to the experts on the Upper Thames Moths blog.  The eternally helpful webmaster there, former air traffic controller Dave Wilton, was back speedily with the correct ID and I wasn't far off. The moth is Agonopterix heraclia/ciella and Dave adds interesting additional info, especially on its diet:

Your moth is a rather well-preserved individual of Agonopterix heracliana/ciliella (they've usually lost many of their scales by this time of year, after hibernation, so aren't as well marked as this one). Agonopterix alstromeriana is a much more brightly coloured moth than this which also hibernates, quite a common species which I imagine you will get in your garden too. However, your Alstroemerias are safe because its larvae actually use the far more sinister plant Conium maculatum, otherwise known as Hemlock.

Finally, two of my rivals in terms of getting at the moths. It's impossible to be really cross with a robin but, my goodness, you have to keep an eye on them when examining the eggboxes. One distraction and they're in and out in a flash. One moth fewer for me.

As for the twilight bats, just about discernible below. I cannot really tell how many moths they capture but clearly there are enough to keep them circling round.