Saturday June 25 - a mothing we will go

 Shortly after completing my last posting, calamity struck. Well perhaps that's going a bit far, but we lost electrical power to our house. Once we'd discounted a standard power cut it became apparent that we required the assistance of our electricity supplier and various men with increasingly large diggers to get us up and running again. Although we got emergency power restored through a cable linking us to our neighbour within four hours, we had to "wait in" for the guys to dig up the pavement to get things back to normal. 

This meant no birding.

Fortunately, I could still do moths. So on Thursday night I caught 114 moths of 37 species. Whether any were new to the garden is open to conjecture, but there were definitely 16 new for the year. These were: Green Oak Tortrix, Lime Hawk-moth, Bird-cherry Ermine (five), Common Footman, Red-barred Tortrix, Elephant Hawk-moth (three), Peppered Moth, Flame (two), Spotted Shoot Moth, Dark Arches, Water Veneer (nine), Marbled Minor ag (three), Euzophera pinguis, Sallow Kitten, Leopard Moth, and Blood-vein.

Lime Hawk-moth

Elephant Hawk-moth

Sallow Kitten

Peppered Moth

You can't beat a pile of stunning moths to raise the spirits. But of course there always a few "don't knows" to tax the brain, usually Pugs and micros.

Pug sp

Pyrallid sp

I'll come back to the Pug later, but I was informed that the Pyrallid was an Ephestia ag. So new for the garden but unidentifiable without dissection, and released to fly again. I'll come back to that later too.

This morning I joined a party of moth-trappers to examine the overnight captures at HOEF College Wood, a previously unexplored (by mothers) wood. It was very exciting. The two experts were Bob and Lee, and I tagged along with a few garden moth-trappers and about a dozen excited teenagers. About seven traps had been set up (I lost count) and we trailed from one to another marvelling at the numbers caught and the variety discovered. They told us they would only be showing us the macro moths, because the micros would take too long. Fair enough.

Before we started Bob invited us all to guess how many macro-moth species we would find. The highest guess was 85, and it wasn't high enough. The final figure was 93. My own notebook only got up to 59, so I missed quite a few, but I tried hard to record lifers. 

These are the ones I managed to photograph:

Pebble Hook-tip

Burnished Brass

Brown Scallop

Engrailed

Sandy Carpet

July Highflyer

Clouded Brindle

Dot Moth

Green Arches

To these I should add Plain Golden Y, and Lilac Beauty which were resting in a display trap of "moths we caught earlier". 

So that's just the lifers. I'll be adding the year-ticks to my year list page, suffice to say there were a lot.

Now, do you remember the unidentified Pug from my garden at the start of this ridiculously long post? Well I was chatting to Lee, one of the leaders, and he was keen to show me an identification app called Obs identify. It seems to be Dutch, and he reckoned it was extremely accurate. I asked if it could make an assessment of my Pug, which I had touted on Twitter as a possible Shaded Pug (very local and rare in the West Midlands). We decided to give it a go, and it came out as a 93% confidence identification of Shaded Pug. 

However, I was recommended to send the photo to David Brown (better than the app) for a definitive call. 

I will update as soon as I get his verdict....Six months later (I forgot to update this post) I can confirm that David agreed it was a Shaded Pug.

I'm sorry some of the photos are a bit blurred, but it was all very frenetic. Just to show how much better than my garden College Wood was, this is a photograph of one tray of Buff-tips taken from just one of the traps.

Back to the app. I also tried it out on the Ephestia ag and it came up with the closely related, and rare, Vitula biviela, but dissection would still have been necessary for certainty, so I'm no further forward.

As for birds, I noticed a singing Garden Warbler, a singing Willow Warbler, and saw a Red Kite on the way home.