Monday May 28

Just a few moths to report. I didn't put out the moth trap because we decided I couldn't spend the time emptying a boxful of moths this morning.

Nevertheless a handful of moths made it into the house. In fact the first one, Brown House Moth, was probably in here anyway. It's more of a surprise that I haven't seen one this year until now.

Brown House Moth

The rest definitely flew through the window of the bathroom. A pug turned out to be a Common Pug, and I was confident enough about its identity to release it after photographing it in the dark.

Common Pug

The remaining three were micros; A Tachystola acroxantha, a White-shouldered House Moth, and my first Diamond-back Moth of the year.  This species looks at first glance like a seed, but amazingly is a migrant, albeit a very common one.

Diamond-back Moth from above (at its most seed-like)

Diamond-back Moth side-on

It sounds as though, although we had thundery showers yesterday, we were lucky to avoid the deluge and flooding experienced by my sister living five miles away in Tidbury Green.

One other creature to mention. I saw a dead Hedgehog as I was heading for the supermarket this morning. While this is obviously bad news for the road casualty, it at least means that the species still exists around here. We used to see them regularly, but nowadays its just the odd corpse (and only one of those last year). The national decline has been attributed to traffic, to the isolation of discrete populations, to pesticides in the countryside, and to the increasing use of slug pellets. It's probably all of the above.