Early Grey

Second moth of the year caught. This time it wasn’t in the trap but sitting on the ground right next to the trap. It’s an Early Grey, turns out that they don’t often tend to go into the traps. My wife declared that she’d saw quite a few Early Greys but had managed to dye them away!

A happy mother’s day

As noted in previous posts I’ve branched out into moths as well as butterflies, got hold of a moth trap and set out to catch some moths. Needless to say it’s not all that easy to catch moths at the end of winter. In fact I’d saw my first butterfly of the year, a peacock, a week before finally catching a moth.

And what a time to catch a moth, mother’s day… Perhaps the countryside had been stripped of flowers and the moths were looking for alternate places to visit. More likely it’s just the time of the year that they are starting to appear in gardens. Anyway I got my first moth of the year and it was a Chestnut.

From doing a bit of reading and from trial and error what I’ve learnt is that moths are a bit like fair weather golfers. They don’t like the cold and they don’t like the wind. It wasn’t until this weekend that the it’d been warm enough to tempt them out of hiding and that the wind was down enough not to blow them into the next county.

Happy mother’s day one and all!

Species count 2015: 1

Going on an egg hunt

Early January doesn’t have a lot of butterflies or moths flying around, well not many that can be easily found so when I saw a plea for help from the Warwickshire branch of Butterfly Conservation to count some eggs of the Brown hairstreak I thought I’d lend a hand.

The egg hunt was organised by the Brown Hairstreak Champion for the area: my wife asked how they pick a champion – “Is it the person who finds the most eggs?”. I like to think that that may be the way it’s done but I suspect volunteering and getting picked by a committee might be somewhat closer to the truth.

The hunt took place at Ryton Pools Country Park, a Warwickshire council park that is reasonably near my house. This is the only place in Warwickshire that there is a record of a colony of this butterfly, it’s pretty scarce in this county.  I’d not been to the park before so it was nice to see another local attraction and hopefully some eggs too– I’ll definitely be back.

How do you find a Brown Hairstreak egg? Imagine the proverbial needle in a haystack. Well your fairly close, it may well be harder – you need to find something the size of a pin head in a 100 acre country park! Luckily you can narrow that down to Blackthorn as that’s where the females lay the eggs. Once you find the Blackthorn you’ve got a chance of finding the eggs.

The butterfly places the eggs on relatively young growth on the blackthorn, it seems to like suckers and places the eggs at the junction of new growth, see picture (not one of mine sadly). You have to examine the blackthorn from bottom to about head height, checking both sides and hopefully you’ll find some. To give you some idea of how scarce they are I spent five hours doing this and didn’t find any!

Luckily I got to see some I was shown what to do by some much more experienced people who do this regularly. They showed me some they had found earlier and they found another eight or so eggs whilst I was there. No beginners luck for me this time.

In case you are wondering… the person who found the most eggs was the current West Midlands Champion, maybe my wife was right!

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.