Some impossible moths identified

Mothing is very different from birding. With birds identification can be achieved by sight, and occasionally with a camera. Very rarely certain cryptic species are now being confirmed through DNA analysis. The days of taking specimens are thankfully long gone.

Not so for moths. Many entomologists have long accepted that certain species can only be identified under a microscope, and broadly speaking the smaller the species the more necessary the specimen.

As a birder I resisted the urge to take specimens in my first year and attempted all identifications by eye and camera. Even with the larger moths this meant a few species pairs (Dark or Grey Dagger for instance). But in 2019 I reluctantly "took" a handful of tiny ones as I wasn't even certain what family they were.

The drill is that at the end of the year the recorder does a sweep of moth trappers to pick up their specimens for examination. Actually, one or two of mine simply expired in the trap (although these turned out to be ones I had already recorded).

Anyway, the point of all this waffle is that Nigel Stone, the recorder, has now established what my motley collection were. They included two species from my garden which were new to SP06 (the 10km square shared by my house and Morton Bagot), and one which I had not seen before.

The good ones in the garden were Coleophora laricella, and Oegoconia quadripuncta, the latter I had guessed at, the former stood no chance of visual identification.

Coleophora laricella under a hand lens - 31/05/2019

Oegoconia quadripuncta - 24/07/19

At least the Recorder's Guide states that these species cannot be identified without a specimen analysis. Not so a third moth, Acrobasis advenella which should have been identifiable from a photo and wasn't even a garden tick (although that honour had gone to a very worn moth which I had some doubts about).

Acrobasis advenella

At least I now know it does occur in the garden.

Finally, I retained one moth from my Morton Bagot trapping session at the end of July 2019. I thought I recognised it as Cnephasia ag, one of which I had briefly detained in 2018 before learning that identification was not possible from a photograph. In fact is has turned out to be a species called Eana incanana which is at least on the same page of my Field Guide as all the Cnephasia moths. Actually it was so similar to the one in the garden in 2018 that I suspect that was also this species, but I'll never know for certain.

Eana incanana

At least the guide did confirm that this moth cannot be identified with confidence from a photograph.

To those who may be totally opposed to specimen taking I can only say that I will keep the dark art to an absolute minimum this year.

So far I haven't caught a single moth in 2020.