Scarce Bordered Straw in the garden - Oct 4

I took the trap out last night and was pleased find 25 moths, including two that were new to me, in the trap this morning.

The new ones took me a while to identify, and I am yet to hear from JS with verification. They were a Scarce Bordered Straw, and a Grey Pine Carpet. The latter is very similar to the Spruce Carpet, but after much deliberation I have decided it was this species.

Scarce Bordered Straw

Grey Pine Carpet

Among the other moths, I caught my first Red-green Carpet of the year.

Red-green Carpet

After sending a tweet out (claiming the moth to be a Frosted Orange), I found an image on UK Moths of a Scarce Bordered Straw which more closely matched my image than Frosted Orange does, so I think it could be a scarce migrant and not the fairly common resident I thought it was. I have since had plenty of confirmatory tweets.

The moth is an irregular visitor to Warwickshire. There were none in 2016, 20 in 2017, and one in 2018.

While searching the fence for additional moths, I came across a quite extraordinary looking Harvestman species. It turned out to be Dicranopalpus ramosus ag. The ag bit signifies that taxonomists recently split was was the easiest Harvestman to identify because of its super-long legs and split cranial palps into two species only identifiable from a specimen under the microscope.

Dicranopalpus rmaosus ag

Finally, a Redwing flew over calling.