Tuesday 3 September 2013

Snouts in the trap


I put the trap under some bushes for the first time last night and as a result, spent almost as much time searching their leaves for sleeping moths - such as the Willow Beauty above - as on those actually in the bowl.


One result, which puts me off repeating the experiment, was that a couple of the more delicate arrivals flew into a different and lethal trap: the web in the second picture spun by an opportunistic local spider which had the arclight of my moth lamp to work by.


By far the most numerous of the 150-odd moths in the eggboxes were Snouts like the one shown here, the Pinocchios and Cyrano de Bergeracs of the moth world. Otherwise there was a routine assembly of the small, brown and Martin-muddling school of moths, relieved by this lovely Frosted Orange below and a Carpety moth which, predictably, I am still trying to identify - the darkest form of the Common Marbled maybe? Or a late July Highflyer?


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