How’d you catch a moth?

In summer months this doesn’t seem to be much of a problem. Simply read a book late at night with one of your windows open and your bound to have a few of the little blighters bashing into the bedside lamp. Funnily enough that wasn’t part of the course but as a strategy it works:

1. They tend to come out at night

2. They are generally attracted to lights

3. There’s lots of them in the summer

4.They’re partial to a bit of historical fiction

So what people do is they make traps using powerful light bulbs and boxes. Egg boxes are critical too (more on that later). The moths are attracted to the light, they then fall down holes and end up trapped in the box.

There a a few decisions about what type of trap to get:

• Mercury Vapour or Actinic (mercury vapour is much brighter, attracts more moths but might be unsuitable if overlooked by other people’s houses – really bright, but more moths!)
• Mains powered or not (where are you going to trap – out in the woods or in your back garden?)

I want to catch them in the back garden and I didn’t fancy falling out with the neighbours so I went for Actinic and mains powered.

• Next decision: make one or buy one. You can find designs on the internet, such as this one: link to moth trap design. So if you have reasonable DIY skills you can build one yourself. I priced it up and found it was probably only marginally more to buy a new one from Watkins & Doncaster.  I went for the Skinner type trap.

Oh and the egg boxes… It turns out that they are quite happy to sit on the egg boxes overnight as they like the rough cardboard texture. No luck if you get the cheaper plasticky egg boxes, they’re apparently no use. Presumably free range egg boxes will attract a better quality moth too.

As soon as I start catching them I’ll start posting details. There are lots of other ways to catch moths too. If I try them I’ll write about them too.

Moths too?

As autumn came in it was clear that there just aren’t that many butterflies around. That’s a lot of time to be sitting around waiting for them to reappear. Unless I went looking for eggs, caterpillars or chrysalids I’d need something else to to do.

What looks like a butterfly but isn’t a butterfly? Well it’s a moth. I’d been sent an email advertising a course at the Warwickshire Wildlife Trust called Winged Splendour that covered butterflies and moths. 10 weeks on a Monday evening hearing about various aspects of Lepidoptera.

The course was great it covered:

• differences between moths and butterflies
• identification of species
• habitats
• lifecycles
• survival techniques

The best parts of the sessions are the start and finish: David (the course leader) brings in a selection of moths that had been caught the previous night and they get passed around so that you can have a good old look a them. David talks about the moths and gives you various details about them. At the end of each session the moth trap gets brought in to see what was caught that evening (with mixed success). It turns out that hornets sometimes get caught in traps!

So now that I’ve been on the course I’m going to be on the look out for moths as well as butterflies. In the winter you can find such imaginatively named moths as the Winter moth, the December moth, and the November moth.

Winterton Dunes - 14th September

As part of our holiday to North Norfolk we spent a fair bit of time at the beach. where we were staying was a five minute drive to the beach or you could walk there instead. I chose to walk there one day as the route passes through Winterton Dunes, which is a Natural England national nature reserve.
We had superb weather with the sun splitting the sky and rather warm temperatures. Hopes were high for butterfly spotting. This time i was not to be disappointed. On the way towards the dunes there were a lot of white butterflies and even more Red Admirals sitting on Ivy flowers or on brambles. fff
The highlight of the trip to the beach was my first ever sighting of Small Coppers and there were loads of them. I enjoyed chasing them round on the dunes, luckily they were fairly happy to pose for photos.

There were some other butterflies in amongst the small coppers. They kept leaping up from the grass to chase off coppers and others of there own sort. They were fast and I struggled to keep up with any of them. I eventually caught up with and photographed one but I have no idea what it is as it’s pretty dishevelled. I’ll try and find out what it is somehow!

Hickling Broad September

For a last summer trip I went with my family and my in-laws to Norfolk. the weather was good to us, but would the butterflies be? I’d done some reading on the internet and it looked like Hickling Broad was the place to go to see Swallowtails. Straight off there were two disapointments in the visitor centre. Firstly my membership card for the Warwickshire Wildlife Trust was not valid here, valid at 2000 odd reserves but not this one! Secondly there was a second brood of Swallowtails this year but they did not survive very long due to the poor weather in August. However there were loads of dragonflies to see and a few Red Admirals and Small Tortoiseshells to see too.
There were a few surpises too. We managed to see a common lizard on one of the jetties onto the broad and a Peacock met us at the visitor centre on the way out. Not a butterfly Peacock but the feathered variety. Overall a good morning out and worth the money I begrudgingly had to pay.

Horsey Gap

As part of my trip to Norfolk I had hoped to find Green Fritillaries at Horsey Gap. Needless to say I had no such luck as I’m not sure any fly at this time of the year. It was sunny anyway and we had a great time looking at the seals and I found a colourful spider in the dunes.

In terms of butterfly action I only saw a few Meadow Browns near to the gap. No pictures to show as I couldn’t catch them.

PS. it’s a very long walk from the Horsey Pump                     

Back to Oakley Woods again!

Once again I cajoled the family into traipsing round Oakley Woods in order to find a few more butterflies.

The aim was to find some different species, needless to say that didn’t happen but we enjoyed chasing after the usual suspects (Commas, Speckled Woods, Red Admirals and Green Veined Whites). The Commas in particular were out in force. You can see the “comma” on the hind wing of the comma on the left.

The Red Admirals pictured below were found on some Holly bushes. I particularly like the black and white banding on their antennae.

I’m sure I saw a more unusual butterfly flying higher up in the canopy but it didn’t come down to allow for an identification. It’ll keep me coming back to the wood to identify it though.

I found a caterpillar of the Elephant Hawk Moth, pretending to be a snake, when i got home. It pulls its head into its body to take on the appearance of a cartoon snake. How clever!

Trip to Twycross Zoo

 

For the last few weeks I’d not been able to get out to see any butterflies due to a combination of poor weather and other commitments. As we had some visitors who enjoyed visiting zoos we took them to Twycross Zoo. This gave me the chance to take some pictures of butterflies too. I have no idea what type they are as my book doesn’t cover tropical butterflies. You didn’t really have to look for them as they were all around, occasionally landing on members of our party. I really liked the black and white one pictured below.