Martin's Moths
A tale of moths and men.
Sunday 17 March 2024
Showy
Sunday 10 March 2024
Mothers' Day moths
Wednesday 28 February 2024
One of Three
My granddaughter and her schoolfriends rescued a tiny caterpillar - pic above - last week after one of them, blessed with especially eagle eyes, spotted it by an ivy leaf below a wintering beech hedge. With the soft-heartedness common in pre-teen girls, they decided to 'rescue' it and so it came home to Granny and Grandpa at the end of school. (It was our week to be on grandchild duty).
I didn't have my caterpillar Bible but the internet is an even better resource and we soon had a shortlist of possibilities. Because of the cattie's extreme youth, however, a precise ID was beyond our joint powers. But our best guess was the Yellow-tail and that meant searching for hawthorn and blackthorn, with leaves of the species' other foodplants, oak, sallow and other deciduous trees being unlikely at this time of the year.
Monday 19 February 2024
New Year, New Moth
I've just had the trap out for only the second time this year - the first back in late January yielding a visitor total of exactly nil. This time, the unusually mild night of Valentine's, saw more than 40 moths snugly asleep in the eggboxes. Among them, most unusually after all my years of shining the light, was a new species for the garden.
Behold the Oak Nycteolene, in its full glory in the first picture above and as I found it in the second, below. I say that it is new to me but as you can see, it is very self-effacing and therefore easy to miss. Its colour also makes for good camouflage in the creamy and grey boxes, so I may have overlooked it on previous visits.
The moth is a macro but very similar in both size and appearance to some of the micro Agnonopteryx family in whose ranks it has occasionally been mistakenly numbered in the past (see pic of the worst offenders below from the Micro-moth Bible). To double-check, I posted my top picture on the invaluable Upper Thames Moths blog with its many expert contributors, asking while about it if any of them knew what its curious second name might mean.
My Googling got me as far as linking the Nyc part to the Greek word for night but otherwise I was left with my fantasy that Nycteolene might be some sort of oil or paraffin which could power a portable moth trap out in the wilds. So many thanks to Tim Arnold, one of the experts mentioned above, who kindly commented thus:
Saturday 23 December 2023
Merry Christmas from - and to - the Moths
Here's an exciting game of Spot the Moth for what is probably going to be my final post for 2024, though - who knows - a quiet and not-too-cold spell before the New Year may persuade me to plug in one last time. Anyway, the solitary resident of the eggboxes two nights ago was an attractive and good-condition Angle Shades. Can you spot it, above? Hours of fun, or half a minute at least.
Sunday 19 November 2023
Autumn colours
Two Feathered Thorns came last night and you could be forgiven for thinking on first glance that they might be different species of moth. The yellowy, softly-shadowed one above is unlike any other I have had in the trap before. The one below is the usual form.
Both are males with their excellent antennae. Their solitary companion in the trap was a dozy Sprawler - like the Feathered Thorns, the possessor of a nice warm, furry collar on its thorax.
Wednesday 8 November 2023
Whiskery gents
Sunday 5 November 2023
Previous Pasha
As an epilogue to my last post, I thought that I should show you a photo of the only other time that I have seen a Two-tailed Pasha, on the serpentine island of Meneghello near Hvar in Croatia some 20 years ago. Unlike the hill-topper in Provence, it was swooping about on a beach and took cover in a fissure in the rocks - there is scarcely any sand in that part of the world. I managed to get the photo above but then it was off, and it did not come back.