Friday June 28 - micro moths

It's amazing what fun you can have with wildlife without even leaving your back garden.

Its been properly warm both during the day and at night this week, so I put the moth trap out on Wednesday evening with considerable optimism.

I awoke early brimming with anticipation, and as expected, found myself knee-deep in moths. In fact there was so much to look at and puzzle over, that I have decided to produce three posts to cover the same two days rather than one very long one. The subjects are; micro moths, then macro moths, and  finally other creatures (not moths).

So on Thursday morning I was slightly alarmed to discover that the trap and its surroundings contained a considerable number of very small moths. Some were reasonably familiar; two Bird-cherry Ermines, five Codling Moths, a Diamond-backed Moth, seven Crambus pascuellae, four Chrysoteucha culmellae,  a Bee Moth, an Aleimma loeflingiana, and only my second Marbled Orchard Tortrix.

Marbled Orchard Tortrix

Another was unfamiliar from this year, but has been identified in the bathroom in a previous year, a Red-barred Tortrix.

Red-barred Tortrix

The rest were completely new to me. All I could do was try to photograph them (with mixed success)  and then work them out later.

Phycita roborella

Crassa unitella

Gypsonoma dealbana

Eudonia lacustrata

Pammene fasciana

Bud Moth

Out of the moths shown above, in all cases I only saw either one or two, apart from the Eudonia lacustrata, of which I caught seven. To be perfectly honest, the Bud Moth was found in the bathroom on Thursday evening and identified this morning.

As usual I sent all my photos of "new" moths to JS, and he agreed them all (apart from one I will come to in post three, which was not even a moth!)

I also sent him a photograph of one I knew couldn't be identified from a photograph because it came from a group called Coleophora which can only be safely identified through the examination by experts of specimens. The reason I sent it to him was that I was extremely pleased with myself for having successfully photographed it through my hand lens.

Coleophora sp

Quite a few moths escaped before I could examine them, the micros seem to be much less dozy in the morning than the macros.

My recent email correspondence with JS has led to one unexpected finding. I do not, as I had thought, live in Worcestershire. Actually I do, but the moth recorders use an older form of unit called a vice-county. It turns out I live in the part of Redditch which lies within VC38 (Warwickshire). So the birds belong to Worcestershire, and everything else to Warwickshire.

As if life wasn't complicated enough.