Report for w/b 13th April

I probably missed the most promising night of the week due to feeling unwell and not up to putting the trap out (and getting up before dawn to empty it!) However, I was feeling OK again later in the week and conditions for the Friday night (17th) were still looking quite encouraging: light winds, quite mild, no moon and overcast with a bit of light rain forecast in the early morning.

The total of 32 moths was not overwhelming but these were of 17 different species, so the most diverse catch so far this year, and 8 of these were new records for the year. One of them (a Streamer) was a new record for my Eastbourne garden. Other species of note among the new records were the earliest Blair’s Mocha I’ve seen (which I wrote about previously, here), a Toadflax Brocade (which will feature in next week’s post) and a Least Black Arches.

Before moving on to look at some species seen recently, you will probably have noticed that this edition, being number 50, means that the Moth Report has reached a milestone! I’m planning to continue the series in its present form at least for the foreseeable future. If you were teetering on the brink of pressing the ‘Make a donation’ button (at the bottom of one of my posts) but haven’t yet done so, you could help me celebrate reaching the 50 posts milestone by taking the leap!

The Brindled Beauty, Lycia hirtaria

Year total to date: 4 (First: 17th March)

Well it’s not quite “Thrice the brinded cat hath mewed”1 but it’s the third moth species I’ve discussed with has the word ‘Brindled’ in its name. First it was the Pale Brindled Beauty (here; in that post I discussed the origin and meaning of the word brindled/brinded), then last week (here) it was the Brindled Pug. And there are some eight more to go - it was quite a popular word when these species were being given their common English names.

James Lowen2 writes:

The grouchy appearance of this large, grizzled moth belies a peacable, friendly demeanour that enchants Maya3. Its woollen greyness recalls the fusty grandpa overcoats I wore in my teenage Dr Marten years. Nationwide data collected since 1970 - among 25 million records analysed by Butterfly Conservations - reveal both good news and bad. Brindled Beauty is becoming more widespread in Britain, its distribution extending by nearly a quarter in forty-six years. Simultaneously, however, this same species is getting rarer, its long-term abundance slumping by more than three-quarters since 1970.

The moth is indeed fairly widespread now in much of England and Wales, while in Scotland (where the species is larger and more brightly coloured) it is limited to mainly inland areas of the Highlands.

The range of this Scottish population coincides reasonably well with that of another species in the same genus, the Rannoch Brindled Beauty, Lycia lapponaria scotica, which is not found anywhere else in the British Isles. But there’s a major difference between these two species, so it’s surprising they’ve been placed in the same genus. While the Brindled Beauty has normal females (without the serrated antennae), in the Rannoch Brindled Beauty the females are wingless! That said though, the Brindled Beauty females do tend to behave rather like wingless females, that is they hardly fly at all, spending their time resting on tree trunks and sending out pheromone signals to attract the males.

The species name for the Brindled Beauty, hirtaria, was given to this moth by the Swedish entomologist Carl Clerck in 1759, making it one of the first species to receive a scientific name (I wrote a bit about Clerck in an earlier post (here)). The name comes from the Latin hirtus, ‘hairy’ or ‘shaggy’, and most likely relates to the thick fur around the thorax, needed to keep the moth’s flight muscles warm when it is on the wing in the early spring. Clerck, though, probably wasn’t aware of the related species the Small Brindled Beauty (Apocheima hispidaria)4 … that is even hairier!

The Pine Beauty, Panolis flammea

Year total to date: 2 (3rd and 12th April)

Until last year I’d seen this moth only three times, and never more than once in any given year. However, last year I had a total of four, and this year I’m up to two already and we’re currently only half-way through its flight season. It doesn’t take a lot of imagination to see why it was given the species name flammea! This name was given to it in 1775 by Denis and Schiffermüller, whom I wrote about previously (here). It doesn’t always look quite so fiery though - here’s a much less flamboyant example:

As its name suggests the caterpillars of this moth feed on pine trees, and it would seem that their original host plant was the Scots pine (Pinus sylvestris), although it probably also used other related species. The young caterpillars feed on young pine needles, somehow5 eating the centre of the needles but not the skin, while more fully grown caterpillars feed on older needles.

Then in 1855 another pine tree was introduced to the UK from western North America, the lodgepole pine (Pinus contorta), so named because Native Americans used its straight stem as the central support pole of their lodges or wigwams. Although it was noticed that this tree grew well in very poor soil, for many years it remained as a specimen tree in Victorian gardens and arboreta. Then after WW2 Britain’s timber forests were severely depleted and from the mid-1950s to the mid-1960s the Forestry Commission planted many thousands of acres of lodgepole pines in Scotland.

But the Pine Beauty moth then developed a taste for the lodgepole pine, and although it had lived for many years in Scots pine plantations without causing significant damage, its populations in some lodgepole plantations got out of hand and many trees were defoliated and subsequently died. Control using insecticide spraying was attempted, but this was of course unpopular and also didn’t work very well because of the young larva’s aforementioned ability to avoid eating the skin of the young pine needles.

Extensive studies comparing the populations of the moth between Scots pine and lodgepole pine plantations eventually concluded that the key difference was that the caterpillar’s predators, particularly spiders and harvestmen, were much less abundant in the lodgepole areas.

Then since around the turn of the century it seems that fungal disease has become a more serious threat to populations of the Pine Beauty, and attempts to use this as a biological control agent have been made. However, the commercial importance of the lodgepole pine is not now as great as it once was. Indeed, in some areas where the pines were planted on peat bogs, attempts are now underway to remove the trees and allow the peat bogs to recover as a natural habitat.

The Shoulder Stripe, Earophila badiata

Year total to date: 1 (6th April)

This moth has quite a widespread distribution across most of Britain, at least where its foodplants, dog-rose and other wild roses, grow. It’s on the wing from March to May, although its flight season appears to have moved forward two or three weeks over the past 30 years or so. In the UK it has also shown a long-term decline in abundance and in distribution, which might explain why I haven’t seen it very often; in fact the one I recorded on 6th April (actually at the patio doors rather than in the light trap) is the first one I’ve seen in Eastbourne. Previously I had recorded just three while I was living in Hurstpierpoint.

This is a rather variable moth, especially in the intensity of the brown colouration, and a number of named colour forms exist including one called ab. alpestris from the Tyrolean Alps at 3,400m elevation, which has a distinctly browner appearance compared with lowland populations.

I was a bit confused about the genus of this moth, which I’ve stated above as Earophila, but some sources give the genus as Anticlea (the same genus as the Streamer (mentioned in the trap report above); this genus was in fact constructed by James Stephens who I wrote about last week (here), and it predates the genus name Earophila). Well, many taxonomists love creating new genera and moving species into them, so maybe that’s what happened here. But while reading around this I came across a 2026 scientific paper (here) which suggests that this group of moths is in need of a taxonomic review!

The paper reports that up to around 1990 there were two distinct populations of this moth in Finland, one in southwestern Finland and the other in the northern part of Karelia in the east of Finland, with a gap of about 400 or 500 km between them. But since 1990 the gap has been “rapidly colonized” and the range of the species in Finland is now contiguous. The paper considers whether the two original populations were indeed the same species, but the details are a bit technical. The authors conclude that probably both populations (and some other similar populations) should all be regarded as the same species, Earophila badiata, but probably this should still be regarded as work in progress. They do not speculate on the reasons for the sudden colonization between the two original populations.

The species name badiata relaties to the brown colouration of the moth. It’s from the Latin badius, ‘chestnut’ or ‘reddish-brown’; the English word ‘bay’ as used when describing a horse’s coat colour comes from the same root.

That’s it for this week. The next issue is scheduled for Tuesday, 28th April

This newsletter will always remain free. However, if you feel you want to show your appreciation by making a financial contribution you can use the button below to take you to a website where you can do so. I will donate any money I receive through this route to a charity, most likely Butterfly Conservation but other more local wildlife charities might also qualify. Absolutely no obligation, but many thanks if you do.

Make a donation

Report for w/b 6th April

Wednesday (8th) looked a promising night with next to no wind in the forecast and quite mild temperatures, especially in the early part of the night before the moon had risen. The result was 49 of 14 species, bumped up to 51 of 15 species when I add in a couple of moths that came to the patio doors a couple of nights previously. This is the best result so far this year in terms of the species count. Six of the species were new records for the year (NFY), including two for which my all-time sightings totals are still in single figures, the Engrailed and the Shoulder Stripe (which I’ve not seen in Eastbourne before). A couple of commoner species put in their first appearance, the Brimstone (see here) and the Swallow Prominent. The other two NFYs were pugs; with no wind it was a good night for them, totalling 15 of 4 pug species.

Then it was too windy for a few nights until Sunday (12th), although the temperatures have dropped a bit and it’s not what I would call mild (forecast down to 6 or 7 Celsius). The catch was not great, 11 moths of 6 species, but it included one species new for the year (the Muslin, my earliest Eastbourne date for this species), and also the second Pine Beauty of year, which I shall be discussing in next week’s report.

Let’s move on to look at some species seen recently.

The Small Quaker, Orthosia cruda

Year count to date: 26 (First: 5th March)

The Small Quaker is another of the ‘Orthosia’ group of moths which fly in the spring; it is on the wing at much the same time as the Common Quaker which I have discussed previously (see here). As its name implies, it is the smallest member of the group; it’s also one of the commonest, sometimes outnumbering even the Common Quaker, especially at woodland sites. In 2023 and 2024 in my own records its numbers took a dip (total catches of 8 and 5 respectively in my Eastbourne garden), but last year the numbers revived (total 33) and this year is looking promising too. Colin Pratt (in A Revised History of the Butterflies and Moths of Sussex) comments that numbers can be highly variable from year to year.

Its small size is one of the features which help distinguish it from the Common Quaker, but on average it’s only one or two millimetres shorter and both species are variable, so this is not a foolproof method. It’s better to rely on the pattern on the forewings, particularly the two markings known as the stigmata (see the photo below). In the Common Quaker both the orbicular stigma (the round one, nearer to the head) and the reniform stigma (the kidney-shaped one further from the head) are usually clearly marked and outlined in a paler colour. However, in the Small Quaker often only the reniform stigma is present, while if present at all the orbicular stigma is much smaller. Also in the Small Quaker the surface of the wings appears rougher, due to a light sprinkling of black scales (a hand lens is usually necessary to see these).

There is room for some debate about the meaning (or more strictly the relevance) of the species name cruda. It’s from the Latin word crudus, and Peter Marren (in Emperors, Admirals and Chimney Sweepers) says it means ‘unripe’ and is used as a poetic way of saying ‘early’ (referring to the early emergence of the adults). But all the moths in the Orthosia group emerge at roughly the same time, so one might wonder why the Small Quaker should be picked out to carry a name meaning ‘early’. It seems that crudus also has the meaning ‘raw’ or ‘rough’, and is the root of our word ‘crude’ (as in ‘crude oil’) and also the French word crudité for raw vegetables. In that sense it could relate to the somewhat rough appearance of the moth’s wings mentioned above, which other members of the group do not have (well except perhaps for the Powdered Quaker, but that’s a different kettle of fish altogether; it’s my favourite moth from the group and I haven’t seen it since 2022, fingers crossed I’ll get one this year and if I do I’ll definitely be including it in the Moth Report).

When I discussed the Grey Shoulder-knot (here) I commented that its caterpillar had a reputation for being cannibalistic. Well the Small Quaker is another such moth. The cannibalistic tendencies of its caterpillar are remarked on by both Roy Leverton (in Enjoying Moths) and on this website here. But again, it must be stressed that this tendency has been observed only in larvae kept in captivity and it is not clear whether the behaviour occurs in the wild.

The majority of British moths feed as caterpillars on various types of vegetable matter, mostly leaves, and many of them are very fussy about which particular leaves they will eat. Of course there are exceptions, like those that eat dead animal matter (including the two species which eat wool in stored clothes and give the rest of the some 2,500 UK moth species a bad name in some unenlightened circles). But it has always seemed a bit odd to me that species which otherwise follow a quite restricted vegetarian diet might resort to cannibalism in extreme circumstances. But it seems that for a moth caterpillar to have a taste for other insects is not really as unusual as it might sound, and there are several groups of moths which are known to lead a predatory lifestyle in their natural environment.

One such example is a group of species of pug moths which live in Hawaii and which are in the same genus (Eupithecia) as most of the UK pugs, including the Brindled Pug which I discuss below. Lees and Zilli (in their book Moths) write:

The caterpillars mimic twigs at rest, but they have sensitive bristles which, when triggered, cause the caterpillar to suddenly snap backwards and snatch flies (though not literally out of the air) with their long, spiny, grasping legs. Anal projections may serve a similar function, acting like trip wires, so that the whole caterpillar is like a Venus Fly Trap. This pug moth behaviour was an amazing discovery in 1983 by Hawaiian biologist Stephen Montgomery.

Several other groups of moths also have carnivorous caterpillars, and the insects these caterpillars feed on are often from the group known as ‘scale insects’; these are small sap-sucking insects in the order Hemiptera (‘true bugs’). They’re well known for being extremely sedentary, and adult females often never move once they’ve got their sucking mouthparts embedded into a plant. Many of them produce waxy secretions which cover and protect their bodies.

It’s probable that caterpillars which feed on scale insects started off by just eating the wax secretions, but over time they’ve developed a taste for the insects themselves.

The moth Fulgoraecia exigua is an eastern North American species which lays thousands of eggs on plant leaves but instead of eating the leaves when they hatch the caterpillars rest on the leaf edge and wait for a passing planthopper. If it’s their lucky day one comes along and (Lees and Zilli again):

they crawl onto it, then metamorphose into a bizarrely corrugated form exuding a thick wax layer. Their needle-like mandibles project from and retract into a fat round head.

Here’s a photo of one that was found just wandering around on a log in Washington DC, presumably after having dropped off its planthopper host in order to find somewhere to pupate:

Normally they live under the wing cases of the host planthopper, and feed off the host’s haemolymph (the insect equivalent of blood). Apparently this doesn’t always result in the death of the host, but often it does and certainly the host would be substantially weakened. This is what the adult moth looks like:

Another type of carnivorous behaviour is matriphagy, where newly hatched (or newborn) young eat the body of their mother (which could be regarded as an extreme case of maternal devotion, something that moths in general are not noted for). For example some octopuses are known to do this, where the mother effectively commits suicide after giving birth so that the young octopuses get a good first meal. Lees and Zilli mention one genus of moths, Heterogynis, where similar behaviour seems to be standard. But what caught my eye was a mention they make of the African Vapourer moth, Bracharoa dregei, which is closely related to our own Vapourer moth that I wrote a bit about previously (here). In 1953 Bernard Kettlewell (the star of the Peppered Moth story, see here) wrote a paper1 entitled ‘Vapourer group adaptations and the apterous state, with reference to a South African species in which the young larvae eat the living parent’. However, this might not be common behaviour in this species because it doesn’t seem to be mentioned in the species write-up in any of the modern book or website guides to African moths that I’ve been able to consult.

The Brindled Pug, Eupithecia abbreviata

Year total to date: 5 (First: 31st March)

I’ve looked at three of our pug moths in previous reports, and commented that some of them are quite similar to one another and identification from photos can be a problem. This is one of the ones which could be quite tricky, if it weren’t for the fact that it is on the wing much earlier in the year (April and May) than most other pug species, so the date of the observation is a key feature in its identification. If we disregard the Double-striped Pug, which can be found in any month of the year and which I discussed previously (here), there are usually considered to be only two contenders for an April pug; the Brindled and the Oak-tree. These can be separated on the basis of wing shape (Brindled having more pointed forewings) and the shape of the discal spot (the small black mark in the middle of the forewing). This is very thin in the Brindled Pug but shorter and fatter in the Oak-tree Pug. However, there is now a third species, the Golden-rod Pug, whose appearance time seems to be creeping forward. It’s quite rare (or maybe just under-recorded) in Sussex, but this year I had a pug which turned out to be a Golden-rod on 31st March (much to the astonishment of the County Moth Recorder!)

I wrote about Golden-rod Pugs in a previous report (here).

The difficulty of distinguishing some pug species from others can be exacerbated when melanic forms occur. Several species have such melanic forms, and the Brindled Pug is no exception; indeed the Waring and Townsend Field Guide says that the melanic form of this pug is “widespread and frequent alongside the normal form”, but that it can be distinguished from other melanic pugs “by shape of forewing and central spot if present”. And the date of capture can help too, of course. Although I’ve certainly had melanic pugs in the trap before, I’ve looked through my photos, at least those that I’ve transferred to Flickr, and can’t find any photos of them. This must be because I’ve been unable to identify them and therefore decided not to put the photos on Flickr because I don’t know where to file them!

The species name abbreviata was given to this moth in 1831 by the British entomologist James Francis Stephens (1792-1852). It’s from a Latin word meaning ‘truncated’ or ‘abbreviated’, but exactly how this relates to the moth is not clear. It’s an average size for a pug, but the wings are narrower than most other species and so the effect is that the wings appear to be on the long side, rather than being truncated.

This is the first time we’ve met James Stephens in these Moth Reports, so a few paragraphs about him2 would not be out of place, especially as he was born in Shoreham-by-Sea, Sussex, not that many miles along the coast from where I am in Eastbourne. His father was a naval captain and he had an uncle who was an admiral.

At the age of 15 his uncle got him a job as a clerk in the Admiralty Office at Somerset House, but his real interest was in insects and at the age of 16 he decided to compile a list of all the known British species. In four years he had listed 3,673 species, but within ten years the total had more than doubled, and when finally published3 in 1829 it contained 10,116 species.

In 1818 (at the age of 26) he was granted leave of absence from his Admiralty job in order to help rearrange the insect collections at the British Museum, under the direction of Elford Leach (about whom I wrote a few weeks ago, here). This work gave Stephens the encouragement to start work on a new book, Illustrations of British Entomology, the first volume of which was published in 1828, to be followed by another 11 volumes over the following 18 years.

During the first half of the 1830s Stephens was still occupying a junior and poorly paid position at the British Museum. His friend and mentor Leach had long since resigned his position at the Museum following his nervous breakdown, and it seems Stephens got wind of the fact that the Museum was planning to publish its own catalogue of British Insects, which he feared would compete with his own works and reduce the subscription base on which his Illustrations series depended. Although the Museum publication never happened, the episode increased Stephens’ sense of insecurity and led to him becoming paranoid that his work would be plagiarised.

He accused another British (Scottish) botanist and entomologist, James Rennie, of plagiarising some of his work for his own publication, Conspectus of the Butterflies and Moths (published 1832). The case was filed as one of a breach of copyright at the Court of Chancery4 in 1832. Whether the case was actually heard or whether Stephens withdrew it pre-trial is not clear, but the outcome was that Stephens was considered to have lost the case, was obliged to cover Rennie’s costs and was in danger of being declared bankrupt.

As you might imagine, this case was a hot topic among the entomologists of the day, the majority of whom were on Stephens’ side. And who should step into the breach but one Edward Newman, whom we met a few issues ago (here; remember those adder-eating hedgehogs?). It would seem that although Newman felt it had been a mistake for Stephens to bring the case, he nonetheless organised a fund to support him financially.

After the case Stephens returned to the Admiralty, but he was not popular there as a result of his long absence and because of the adverse publicity brought by the case. He eventually resigned from the Admiralty and returned to the Museum as an unpaid assistant, where he remained until his death aged 61.

Back in October I wrote (here) about another English entomologist, Henry Stainton, who it so happens was based for most of his life within a stone’s throw of the house I grew up in (in Lewisham). I wrote “From 1856 Stainton held weekly ‘open evenings’ to which anyone could bring specimens for identification, or just to talk about insects.” Well it seems that Stainton was not the first to introduce this practice, it was Stephens who started it by keeping open house for entomologists on Wednesday evenings, and making his library available to them. Following his death, Stephens’ extensive collection was purchased by the British Museum and his library was acquired by Stainton, who merged it with his own and continued the open evenings that Stephens had started.

That’s it for this week. The next issue is scheduled for Tuesday, 21st April.

This newsletter will always remain free. However, if you feel you want to show your appreciation by making a financial contribution you can use the button below to take you to a website where you can do so. I will donate any money I receive through this route to a charity, most likely Butterfly Conservation but other more local wildlife charities might also qualify. Absolutely no obligation, but many thanks if you do.

Make a donation

Report for w/b 30th March

The first trap for this week was for Tuesday, 31st March, bringing the total number of traps done in the month to 8. The forecast was mild with very light winds, the only potential problem being an almost full moon with cloud cover varying between 40 and 80 percent during the night, so there could be a bit of competition from the moon. The result was 12 moths of 9 species, nothing special but two new species for the year (Brindled Pug and Goldenrod Pug).

That brings the March total to 181 moths of 20 species; very similar to last year which was 182 of 17 (but on only 7 traps). The species count for the year at the end of March was 26; not the best ever but better than average.

Forecasts over the first week in April didn’t indicate ideal mothing weather, and the best option was a toss-up between the Thursday night (no wind but rather cool) and the Friday night (milder, but also windier). I chose the Friday night (3rd), and although I had only 9 moths they were of 8 different species, including two which were new records for the year; the Frosted Green and the Pine Beauty. These are both moths which don’t turn up in my trap every year, so not a bad result.

Before moving on to look at a couple of species seen recently, I’d just like to restate my thanks all my subscribers, the total number of whom passed 400 for the first time on 31st March.

March Moth, Alsophilia aescularia

Year total to date: 4 (first: 5th March)

This moth is another of those spring moths which overwinters as a pupa and in which the females are wingless. The males rest with the wings substantially overlapped, giving the pose shown in the picture; few other species look like this when resting so this is a useful feature for identification. It is reported that the females can best be found by looking on tree trunks of their foodplants (oak, hawthorn, birch and other broadleaved trees) at night, although I’ve never seen one. Although they don’t fly, they are apparently quite nimble and consequently a bit tricky to photograph. The males are reported to be particularly strongly attracted to light, and will even come to the glow of a mobile phone.

Although listed as ‘common’, until last year I’d never seen more than four of the males in a single year. Last year, though, my total was 12. It’s also quite a good time-keeper; it mostly lives up to its name and (at least for me) appears in March, with a few stragglers lasting into April. I’ve only once seen it in February (in 2019, on the 25th). More widely in Sussex though, Colin Pratt1 reports:

…adults have been seen in every week from early January to the third week of May. This extended flight-time is caused by interventions of cold weather, which often break up the progression of each season’s emergence.

The species name aescularia was given to this moth by Denis and Schiffermüller in 1775 (I wrote a bit about them in a previous post, here). It’s actually based on the genus name of the horse chestnut tree, Aesculus, even though this moth is not particularly associated with horse chestnut, which is just one of several foodplants. Nonetheless one of the French common names for the species is Phalène du Marronnier. Marronier is the French name for the horse chestnut (‘Phalène’ is an old French word for moths of this family). It is probable that this name is just a translation of the Latin name rather than due to any observed association with this tree.

Twin-spotted Quaker, Anorthoa munda

Year total to date: 5 (first: 5th March)

This is not a moth I see that often; until this year I’ve only twice seen as many as three in a year, and sometimes I don’t see it at all, so this year’s current total of 5 is a pleasant surprise and to see two on the same night is most unusual. Two things are fairly obvious from the photo above; firstly where the name ‘twin-spotted’ comes from (the twin spots have been described as looking like quotation marks), and secondly, they can be quite variable.

In fact this moth is more variable than the photo above shows - sometimes the eponymous twin spots are themselves missing - see the photo below:

I’ve never knowingly seen one missing the twin spots myself, but I gather they’re not uncommon and I’ve possibly had one but misidentified it as a Clouded Drab!

The species name munda is another of those coined by Denis and Schiffermüller (in 1775) and is a Latin word meaning clean, neat, elegant or tidy. The genus name, Anorthoa, was created as recently as 1980 when the moth’s previous genus, Orthosia, which contained quite a few spring moths from this family including the Common Quaker discussed recently (here), was spilt into two. The first two letters of the new genus name, An-, is a Greek negating prefix meaning ‘not’ and the rest of the word is very similar to the old genus name, so the meaning of Anorthoa would appear to be ‘not an Orthosia’, although of course most lepidopterists still consider that this moth belongs to the Orthosia group.

This includes the French, whose common name for the species is Orthosie picotée; ‘orthosie’ is just a Gallicised version of Orthosia, while picoté(e) means ‘marked with small dots’ or ‘speckled’ and refers to the twin spots which also give the moth its English name.

The Butterfly Conservation website (here) says that the moth has a single generation each year and flies between March and April. It also comments that the species “overwinters as a pupa with the adult moth fully formed inside before emerging the following spring”2. I’m not sure how unusual this is; the metamorphosis from larva to adult which happens inside the pupa involves the whole body dissolving into a kind of soup before it reforms into the adult body, and this remark implies that for this species this metamorphasis occurs as soon as the caterpillar has pupated and then it just waits to burst out of the pupa when the weather warms up. I’m not sure how many of the species which overwinter as pupae do this, and how many spread the change over the whole winter period; general reading around the subject suggests that the strategy used by the Twin-spotted Quaker might be the commoner approach.

When the adults emerge in the spring, nectar is often in short supply and sallow catkins are one the first reliable sources of it that these and other spring moths can use. Roy Leverton3 describes the pleasure he has in searching for moths on sallow at this time of year, using a torch…

Sometimes their eyes reflect the beam like tiny jewels. However, often the sallows (especially Goat Willow) are too tall, and the moths are way out of reach overhead. Here, the recognised technique is to give the bough or trunk a sudden jar, causing at least most of the noctuids4 to drop to the ground, together with a rain of spent catkins. In bygone times one’s servant used to spread a sheet on the ground first, so that the moths would show up better.

In many ways today’s lepidopterists have it easier than our predecessors did, but I doubt that there are many today who could stretch to having a servant!

That’s it for this week; sorry it’s a bit shorter than usual. The next issue, scheduled for Tuesday, 14th April, should hopefully be back to normal.

This newsletter will always remain free. However, if you feel you want to show your appreciation by making a financial contribution you can use the button below to take you to a website where you can do so. I will donate any money I receive through this route to a charity, most likely Butterfly Conservation but other more local wildlife charities might also qualify. Absolutely no obligation, but many thanks if you do.

**Many thanks to the people who have already donated; this has enabled me to make a donation of just over £20 to Butterfly Conservation**

Make a donation

Report for w/b 23rd March

Monday night (23rd) was the first for several nights when the forecast wasn’t too cold or too windy; a low of 9 Celsius was forecast with the moon at about 1/4 and a light south-westerly breeze. The total catch was 26 moths of 9 species, so typical numbers for March, all the usual suspects, nothing unexpected and nothing new for the year.

Then on Friday night (27th) the forecast looked reasonable; mild at least for the first half of the night, a light breeze, some drizzle and high humidity. However, predicting which nights will yield a good catch is not a precise science (or if it is, there’s some aspect of it that I haven’t yet grasped). The result was even worse than the Monday night; just 9 moths of 4 species, all common spring ones.

I’ll probably try and squeeze in one more session in March, so I’ll save the March summary until the next post.

Let’s move on to look at some species seen recently.

The Early Grey, Xylocampa areola

Year total to date: 10 (first: 9th March)

The Early Grey is one of those moths with a descriptive name which is quite accurate: it’s a grey moth which appears early in the year. It over-winters as a pupa and the adults are on the wing mainly from March to early May. It’s a common moth throughout the UK and April is the month for which I have most records … however I also have one record from February (in 2023) and even one record (in 2022) from January. Most years my total count for this species is well into double figures, with the biggest total so far being 43 last year.

The caterpillar of the Early Grey is one of the few moth species (four I think) that feed on honeysuckle … both wild and cultivated varieties. During the day the caterpillars flatten themselves against the woody stems and are quite well camouflaged. This behaviour could be the reason the genus name Xylocampa was chosen, since the first part of the name comes from the Greek ξύλον (xylon), for ‘wood’. The other part of the genus name is from the Greek καμπή (kampē), one of the meanings of which is ‘caterpillar’. The species name, areola, is a Latin word which is the diminutive of the Latin area, which is the root of the English word ‘area’; so areola = a small area, or a small patch or spot. In the Early Grey, this refers to the distinctive pale mark a bit like of pair of boxing gloves on the forewing.

I store my moth photos (and indeed all my photos) on a site called Flickr, which many of you will be aware of. It’s a popular site with amateur photographers (or at least, it was until it started charging quite a lot if you want to keep more than 1000 photos on it). Most Flickr users make their photos available for anyone to view, and one of the things it does is to keep tags on how many times each photo has been viewed by other people, and they set up league tables so users can compare their scores with those of others. Now I don’t spend a lot of time trying to take arty photos, but now and again some of my shots seem to come out quite well. My third best, with 1413 all-time views, is here. And my second best (a fungus), with 1589, is here. Both these photos were viewed lots of times because I entered them into competitions on the site. But my absolute winner by a clear head (1942 views), which has never been anywhere near a competition, is this:

That’s right, a very run-of-the-mill photo of an Early Grey, one in fact that I took way back in 1968. It puzzled me for quite a while what it was about this shot that made it so popular. Then the penny dropped. I’d included the Latin name in the caption. And a small proportion of Flickr users store a lot of rather dubious photos on the site, and some other users search the site for such photos and can get quite creative in choosing their search terms. And ‘areola’ is an English word with a quite specific meaning … so I guess that’s quite a lot of rather disappointed searchers out there!

The species name areola was first given to this moth in 1789 by Eugen (Eugenius) Johann Christoph Esper (1742–1810). I mentioned him briefly in an earlier report (here) in connection with the Striped Hawk Moth, which also was named by him, but I didn’t say anything about him other than that he was a German entomologist and that he was best known for a book containing some impressive hand-coloured drawings.

Actually Esper was more than an entomologist. His father was a deacon and Esper originally enrolled at the University of Erlangen to study theology. But his innate interest in natural history was noticed by his botany professor, who encouraged him to abandon his theological studies and mentored him in zoological and botanical drawing. Esper finally obtained his doctorate with a thesis on variation within species. He remained with the University, becoming a full Professor of Natural History in 1799. He was pivotal in building up the University’s scientific collections in zoology, botany and mineralogy.

In addition to his interests in entomology, Esper also made a detailed study of zoophytes - plant-like animals such as sponges, corals and hydroids. But the field in which Esper (together with his older brother, Johann) was truly ahead of his time is palaeopathology - the study of disease and injury in ancient organisms using evidence preserved in fossils and bones. It was the best part of century before this became a recognised scientific subject.

The work for which Esper is best remembered is his multi-volume work Die Schmetterlinge in Abbildungen : nach der Natur mit Beschriebungen Europäische Gattungen (‘Butterflies and Moths Illustrated from Nature, with Descriptions of the European Genera’). This work was published in stages between 1776 and 1807 and (according to Wikipedia) contains a total of 438 hand-coloured plates. Here is his illustration of the Early Grey (from Plate 141):

Notice that the wings on the right hand side show the upper surface while those on the left show the underside. Esper used this approach in many of his illustrations.

If you Google ‘Eugen Esper’ you’ll see a number of the sites returned (including the Wikipedia site) include an unattributed portrait of him, in black and white. It looks very much like an oil painting, so the original must be in colour. However, I hunted around unsuccessfully for a copy of the original, then gave up and used Gemini to add some colour:

So, not quite the image I had in mind of a dedicated scientist hunched over pinned specimens and copper-plate engravings, or searching for fossils in a Bavarian cave! More like someone you might meet in the ballroom at Schloss Nymphenburg. But of course the objective of having your portrait painted was to enhance your social standing, and signal your refinement, learning and (not least) wealth. This portrait does quite a good job of that!

Today’s entomologists have not forgotten about Esper; in 1990 a series of entomology books (which has now reached 20 volumes) was launched, entitled Esperiana, Buchreihe zur Entomologie. See here.

The Early Thorn, Selenia dentaria

Year total to date: 2 (17th and 23rd March)

“In a previous issue (here) I talked about the September Thorn, and said that this group of moths (the Thorns) can often be identified to species from the angle at which they hold their wings. Well this one, the Early Thorn, is the most extreme example of this in that this species always rests with its wings held tightly together above its back, like a butterfly.

In the south of England this species has two generations in a year; having overwintered as a pupa the first generation is on the wing from about mid-March to May, and the second generation during August and September. The early appearance of the first generation gives the moth its English common name.

This species is unusual among moths because it exhibits seasonal polymorphism; the two generations differ in appearance, the first generation being darker and more strongly marked while the summer generation is paler and more buff-coloured (and also smaller). There is also some variation within each generation though; darker or melanic forms can also occur but these are seen more frequently in the north of its UK range than in the south.

My own records of this species are not numerous; I’ve never recorded more than three in a year (and no more than two since 2019), and some years I don’t see it at all. The record from 17th March is the earliest date I have seen it.

Usually when I discuss the Latin names of moths, I have to resort to looking up the meaning. But I’m pleased to say, for this one, Selenia dentaria, I was able to translate it correctly without having to do that! The species name dentaria (Fabricius, 1775) is from Latin and means ‘having teeth’. Of course the moth doesn’t actually have teeth, but the outer edges of the wings have indentations (same root!) which is most likely what the name refers to.

Most of the UK Thorn moths are in the genus Ennomos; this includes the previously discussed September Thorn (see above). But three of them are placed in this different genus, Selenia. This is named after the Greek moon goddess Selene, sister of Helios (the sun god) and Eos (goddess of the dawn). Again this name most likely relates to the crescent-shaped indentations in the outer edges of the wings.

Selene's great love was the mortal shepherd Endymion. The beautiful boy was granted eternal youth and immortality by Zeus and placed in a state of eternal slumber in a cave. His heavenly bride consorted with him there each night.

That’s it for this week. The next issue is scheduled for Tuesday, 7th April

This newsletter will always remain free. However, if you feel you want to show your appreciation by making a financial contribution you can use the button below to take you to a website where you can do so. I will donate any money I receive through this route to a charity, most likely Butterfly Conservation but other more local wildlife charities might also qualify. Absolutely no obligation, but many thanks if you do.

Make a donation

Report for w/b 16th March

On Tuesday night (17th) the forecast looked promising, not too cold (down to 8 Celsius), not too much wind, a clear sky but no moon. The result was 36 moths of 13 species, quite a reasonable result for March. Four of the species were new records for the year; three of them (Light Brown Apple Moth, Early Thorn, Brindled Beauty) species which are expected at this time of year, but the fourth was the biggest surprise of the night - a Pearly Underwing. I saw this moth for the first time last year, and featured it in a previous post (here). This migratory moth most frequently reaches the UK in autumn, and sightings in the first three months of the year are very unusual.

Also attracted to the moth light on the 17th was a rather large crane fly … I think it’s the Marsh Crane Fly, Tipula oleracea (any ideas ?):

For the rest of the week the forecasts were either too cold or too windy to suggest that a good catch would be forthcoming, so it’s fingers crossed for next week.

Let’s move on to look at some species seen recently.

The Red Sword-grass, Sylena vetusta

Year total to date: 1 (5th March)

Finding this in the 5th March trap was quite a surprise - it’s a moth I’ve not seen in Eastbourne before and I saw only one during the three years I lived in Hurstpierpoint. It actually has a rather unusual distribution in the UK; whereas there are several moths which are restricted to the south-east of England, this one seems to be more widespread in Wales and Scotland and in the western parts of England with a much more limited distribution in SE England, the midlands and East Anglia. This is rather odd because the resident population is believed to be regularly topped up by immigration from the continent, but it seems that when the migrant moths arrive in the south-east any colonies they establish don’t seem to survive for more than a few years.

In the last edition (here) I mentioned that the Angle Shades moth was unusual in that it folded its wings longitudinally when at rest, so that it looked like a withered leaf. Well the Red Sword-grass also does that, although the effect is different; here’s Katty Baird in Meetings with Moths:

Red Sword-grass … is another moth that rests with its wings folded close to its body. Its streaky crinkled pattern gives it an uncanny resemblance to a small piece of rotting wood. To further the ruse, in the bottom of a light trap they tuck their legs in and ‘play dead’, rolling around as the trap is tipped, behaving just like a fragment of wood.

I’ve probably mentioned in previous editions that the majority of moths overwinter in one of the early stages (egg, larva, pupa) rather than as adults. In recent editions though we seem to have met quite a few species which do overwinter as adults - this is just a consequence of the fact that such moths tend to be on the wing in February and March. Well, the Red Sword-grass is another of these moths; it’s on the wing September to November, hides away to overwinter and then reappears in March and April. It is reported that mating and egg-laying do not occur until the spring appearance.

Also in the previous edition I mentioned the book Enjoying Moths by Roy Leverton. In it, when discussing various methods of attracting moths, he compares sugaring with light-trapping, and comments that some species (including the autumn appearance of Red Sword-grass) are ten times as likely to be found at sugar1 than in a light trap. I guess this could be one reason why I’ve seen this moth only rarely - I’ve never tried sugaring. Maybe I’ll get around to giving it a go sometime this year (provided, that is, I can find a spot in the garden which I can cover with treacle without getting too much flack from other users of the garden!).

The Waved Umber, Menophra abruptaria

Year total to date: 1 (9th March)

Although this moth is entirely brown, the intricate patterning in various shades make it a very attractive insect which is always a pleasure to see. I see this species almost every year (2024 being the only exception), but I’ve never had more than three in any one year. However, I’ve only once before seen it before the last week in April (with the exception being 2020 when one turned up in the second week of April). So it was quite a surprise to see one on 9th March this year! It’s reported as not being strongly attracted to light, so it might be commoner than my records suggest.

This species generally has only a single generation each year, on the wing from mid-April through May, having overwintered as a pupa in a cocoon attached to the foodplant (garden privet, lilac, winter jasmine, possibly ash and birch). In very warm summers there can be a partial second generation in July and August.

Like several of the moths I’ve discussed recently, the Waved Umber can be rather variable in appearance, the main variation being the intensity of the brown markings. Here is a particularly dark example, from Spain:

The reference books also mention a melanic form, said to be relatively common in the London area, but (I think) the photo above is not a true melanic. I looked through most the photos of this moth that come up in a search on Flickr, and couldn’t find any that I would call melanic. Then I tried iNaturalist, which turned up just one example which I think qualifies, from southern France:

The species name abruptaria was given to this moth by Carl Thunberg in 1792. This is derived from the Latin abruptus, which can be translated as ‘abrupt’, but also includes ideas such as ‘steep’, ‘jagged’, ‘broken off’ and ‘interrupted’. Thunberg didn’t explain precisely why he chose this name, but the sudden contrasts in the colouration of the moth are the most likely reason. The original description also came with an illustration:

This is not in the same league as the illustrations prepared by Moses Harris (which predate it, see last week’s edition), but it’s better than having no illustration at all!

When I first started writing this blog in June last year, I realised I would probably learn a few things about moths that I had previously been unaware of. What has taken me by surprise though, and is perhaps the most rewarding aspect of the experience, is the number of extraordinary people I’ve come across that I previously knew nothing about. Last week, for example, there was Elford Leach. And this week … yet another amazing character, Carl Peter Thunberg (1743-1828).

Thunberg was Swedish, and studied at Uppsala under Linnaeus from 1761 to 1767. He was one of Linnaeus’s ‘apostles’, perhaps the most successful - certainly the most widely travelled. After graduating, it was his intention to go to Paris to continue his medical training, but he stopped in Amsterdam where he became friends with another former pupil of Linnaeus and was pursuaded instead to travel further abroad to collect plants for the botanical garden in Leiden, which was lacking in exotic exhibits. Consequently, he joined the Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie (VOC - the Dutch East India Company), obtained a position as surgeon aboard one of their ships and in 1771 set sail for Cape Town. Actually this was probably easier said than done - after all he was Swedish not Dutch - and it seems that in addition to his skills in medicine and botany he was also what we would call today an accomplished networker, somehow managing to attract funding and open doors which enabled him to travel to and collect plants and animals from places few Swedes (or any other nationality for that matter) had achieved before.

Thunberg stayed in South Africa for three years, making trips into the interior. He collected thousands of specimens which were sent back to Uppsala or Leiden, and carried out ethnographic studies of the Khoikhoi people (then known to the Dutch as the Hottentotten). He also perfected his Dutch, which stood him in good stead for the next phase of his travels. In 1775 he again found a post as a ship’s surgeon and set sail for Batavia in the Dutch East Indies (now called Jakarta, in Indonesia). Batavia, however, was not his ultimate destination; within a month he had set sail again, bound for Dejima in Japan.

In the 18th century Japan was essentially closed to foreigners. The Portuguese had been expelled in 1639, mainly because they would insist on trying to spread Christianity, and since then the Dutch had been the only foreigners allowed anywhere near it, and even they were restricted to a small artificial island called Dejima in the bay of Nagasaki, where there was a VOC trading post. The island was linked to the mainland by a small bridge. When Thunberg first arrived, he was bound by the same restrictions as the Dutch on the island. Soon after his arrival, he was appointed head surgeon of the trading post, and he began to establish links with the interpreters from the mainland. In exchange for snippets of Western medical knowledge, Thunberg managed to get occasional access to Nagasaki itself, where the doctors were keen to discover how to treat syphilis (which they called ‘the Dutch disease’). Eventually this led to Thunberg being able to make daytrips to the mainland to collect plants, and even on one occasion to be able to travel to the head of the shogunate at Edo (now Tokyo). He spent 16 months in Japan before setting off on the long journey home.

The journey home included stops for six months in Java and in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), where he collected more specimens. Then on to the Cape and thence to Amsterdam, where he arrived in October 1778. He eventually returned to Uppsala in March 1779, where he learned that Linnaeus had died the previous year, and his professorship had been awarded to his son, Carl Junior. Thunberg took a job as a botanical demonstrator, but in 1781 Carl Junior died and Thunberg was appointed to the chair, as Professor of Medicine and Natural Philosophy. And there he stayed for the best part of 50 years. Fortunately all the specimens he had sent back to Uppsala were still there, and he spent much of his time studying, describing and naming them, and writing books about his travels.

Thunberg married in 1784, but he and his wife had no children of their own, although they did adopt two. So (in case you were wondering) Greta Thunberg is not a descendent (well not a legitimate one at least).

That’s it for this week. The next issue is scheduled for Tuesday, 31st March

This newsletter will always remain free. However, if you feel you want to show your appreciation by making a financial contribution you can use the button below to take you to a website where you can do so. I will donate any money I receive through this route to a charity, most likely Butterfly Conservation but other more local wildlife charities might also qualify. Absolutely no obligation, but many thanks if you do.

Make a donation

Report for w/b 9th March

The forecast for the night of the 9th looked quite promising; mild and overcast with high humidity and no wind. This resulted in a total catch of 55 moths of 9 species - one of the best March nights I’ve had. Most of the moths (30) were Common Quakers (a record for me for a single night) and the main surprise was a lovely Waved Umber; this is the earliest I’ve seen this moth - most of my records for it have been in May. I’ll feature it in next week’s Moth Report.

There were no more nights during the week where the omens were all positive; the best option looked like Saturday night (14th), mainly because hardly any wind was forecast. The temperature forecast was a bit on the cool side though, down to 4 Celsius with clear skies, and there was a frost on the car in the morning. The result was 15 moths of 6 species; all the usual suspects for this time of year with nothing that was a new record for the year - well no moths at least, but I did get the first caddis fly of the year, one of the larger ones:

Let’s move on to look at some species seen recently.

The Clouded Drab, Orthosia incerta

Year total to date: 7 (first: 25th February)

Well what a name to be lumbered with! Although it’s possible for it to be a bit on the drab side (eg the second photo in the gallery), this moth is highly variable and some of the forms are miniature works of art, albeit largely in brown and grey. Variation in moths can be divided into different kinds. Species which are aposematic (i.e. carry warning colouration) tend to have little or no variability at all, presumably because predators need to learn that these moths are distasteful, and the less variable they are the fewer moths get attacked while the predators are learning the lesson. But moths which don’t have the protection afforded by being distasteful tend to be more variable, and predators therefore find it more difficult to develop a search image for them. Among these moths are some which have two or more distinct colour forms without much overlap … an example of this which I’ve discussed in earlier editions is the Peppered Moth (here), and there are several which I haven’t covered yet but will hopefully do so before long (for example the Pale Tussock). But the Clouded Drab is a moth in which the variability can be described as continuous; there is a whole spectrum of different forms which overlap and merge into one another. This moth displays one of the most extreme forms of such variability known among moths. The six I’ve shown above don’t cover the whole range - see here for more examples. (Whilst you’re on that web page, don’t miss Section 1.6 for a picture of some sculptured and delicately patterned eggs).

In his book Enjoying Moths1, Roy Leverton discusses within-species variability and makes several interesting observations, including that:

• moths which are highly variable (such as the Clouded Drab) tend to be common species, while rare or localised species tend to be more uniform in appearance (although he lists several exceptions);

• even when a species is highly variable, with experience it becomes possible to recognize individuals quickly thanks to their ‘jizz’, a birding term which relates to a combination of shape, build, colours and pattern which somehow give one a ‘feel’ for the species. The book was published in 2001, before the advent of ID apps which can now be remarkably good at assigning quite atypical specimens to the correct species; I guess the apps have somehow captured the same idea of the jizz.

The Clouded Drab’s remarkable variability is captured in the species epithet incerta —Latin for ‘uncertain’ or ‘not fixed’. The Dutch common name for the moth also addresses this feature - Variabele Voorjaarsuil (‘Variable Spring Owlet’; ‘owlet’ being a name for moths of this family, the Noctuidae). The French and German names also do this. The species name is another which was bestowed by Hufnagel in 1766. The genus name Orthosia is the same as for the Common Quaker which I discussed last week (here), it’s another of the the group of early spring moths which dominate the trap at this time of year.

The Oak Beauty, Biston strataria

Year total to date: 7 (first: 5th March)

A couple of editions ago I wrote about the loose grouping of moths with ‘Beauty’ in their name; well this is one that is probably most deserving of the term. It’s the largest and most impressive of the moths that are around in early spring; I see them mostly in March but occasionally in February. It’s possible that I might hold a bit of a bias in its favour because I didn’t see my first until my third year of moth trapping (2019), in spite of having read about it and hoping to see one. Then I moved to Hurstpierpoint where I saw another the following year, and in my third year there I saw 12. Then back in Eastbourne again the next year (2023) I saw only two, but last year the total was 13. This is a moth that is said to prefer mature oak woodland, although Chris Manly in Moths of Britain and Ireland says it also occurs in suburban areas. While my records indicate numbers to be increasing at the moment (to get 4 on the same night, as I did on 5th March, equals a record set on 19th March last year), the Atlas of Britain and Ireland’s Larger Moths reports a decline in numbers since the 1970s.

In a recent edition (here) I wrote about some of Moses Harris’s drawings from the 18th century being used in a book by Norman Riley, published in 1944. Here is plate 14 from that book which includes (among other moths) both the caterpillar (at h) and the adult (at k) of the Oak Beauty. According to a note in the text of Riley’s book, these illustrations of the Oak Beauty were not used by Harris in any edition of his book The Aurelian; this was therefore probably the first time that they were published.

This moth is in the same genus as another moth I discussed in an earlier edition - the Peppered Moth, Biston betularia (here). That moth is well known for exhibiting industrial melanism and thereby helping to provide evidence for evolution by natural selection. The variability of the Oak Beauty takes a rather different form from that of the Peppered Moth; whereas the typical form of the Peppered Moth is fairly constant, typical Oak Beauties vary quite substantially. The two brown bands across the forewing vary in width, the ground colour varies between white and greenish-grey and the intensity of the black speckling is also variable. However, unlike the Peppered Moth, a melanic variant of the Oak Beauty is seldom recorded in the UK; it doesn’t seem to be mentioned in any of the standard texts I’ve consulted and the only place I’ve found a reference to UK melanic forms is a few records reported by Colin Pratt in his A Revised History of the Butterflies and Moths of Sussex. Contrarily, melanic forms of the Oak Beauty occur quite regularly in continental Europe and it’s a puzzle as to why they are not more common in UK.

Lepidopterists can think themselves lucky that hybrids occur only rarely in moths; our botanical friends are forever having to cope with interspecies hybrids, which are often commoner that the pure species lines themselves. But it seems that hybrids between these two Biston species, the Oak Beauty and the Peppered Moth, are possible. J.W. Tutt, in British Moths (1902), comments that “Dr Chapman successfully reared some hybrids between these species.” He doesn’t say whether the cross-pairings occurred naturally or were forced in some way, nor does he say whether the resulting moths were fertile.

The species name strataria was first given by Hufnagel in 1767. It’s from the Latin stratum, meaning something spread out, like a blanket or bedspread, hence the derivation of the English word ‘stratum’ meaning a layer. The association with a fabric could be the link Hufnagel used when choosing the word as a name for this moth, and the stripes on the wings could be interpreted as layers. The genus name, Biston, on the other hand makes no reference to the appearance of the moths in the genus … it’s a name from classical mythology and follows a pattern often used by 18th-19th century entomologists. Biston was one of the sons of the Greek god of war, Ares. The following is an excerpt from Wikipedia:

Biston built the city of Bistonia on the shores of Lake Bistonis in Thrace. He also introduced the Thracian practice of tattooing both men and women with eye-like patterns as a magical fetish, in response to an oracle which guaranteed victory against the neighbouring Edonians tribe if so adorned.

Lake Bistonis is now called Lake Vistonida, and lies to the east of Thessaloniki in Greece.

The genus name was selected for these moths by the British zoologist Elford Leach in 1815. There’s a rather intriguing mystery about William Elford Leach (1791-1836), but let’s start with some of the things which are known. He was born in Plymouth, and developed an early interest in marine animals by collecting specimens from Plymouth Sound and along the Devon coast. At the age of twelve he started a five-year medical apprenticeship in Exeter (in those days a medical training was the nearest there was to studying zoology), and while there he collected a centipede in the local gardens which he couldn’t find in his reference books. He recognized it as new to science, and gave it the species name hortensis (‘from a garden’) by which it is still known today.

He moved on to study medicine at St Bartholomew’s Hospital in London, and later in Edinburgh where he completed his medical qualification2. However, he never intended to work as a doctor and in 1813 he took a job as Assistant Keeper (then known as Assistant Librarian) in the Natural History Department of the British Museum.

When he joined the Museum, the collections were in a sorry state and zoological science in Britain had stagnated. Although Linnaeus had established the foundations of zoological classification some 50 years earlier, it was not a perfect system and several inconsistencies had become apparent, especially regarding the major classifications; Linnaeus used only a small number of characteristics to define the major groups, for example, anything with a hard external skin was classified as an ‘insect’, so that included lobsters and centipedes. Zoologists such as Georges Cuvier in Paris had started to redefine these major categories in a more natural way, using a wider range of characters, but British zoologists had resisted such changes. Leach, however, had been reading the French literature are was in contact with the leading French zoologists (in spite of the problems caused by the Napoleonic wars3) and was determined to update the organisation of the Museum’s collections in accordance with these new ideas.

Leach was what we would today call a workaholic. He published numerous papers and books on a wide range of organisms, using these more modern principles - these included crustaceans (on which he was regarded as a principal authority), molluscs, barnacles, fish, frogs, bats and insects (including the moth discussed above). One of his major revisions was to take centipedes and millipedes out of the insect group and create a whole new subphylum for them, the Myriapoda (or the myriapods). He also served on the Council of the Linnean Society, and became a Fellow of the Royal Society at the age of 25.

If you Google ‘William Elford Leach’ you will find a number of images which purport to be portraits of him. However, according to the book I detail below (under ‘A note on sources’), this is the only one that can be confirmed as genuine:

All this relentless work took its toll; in 1821 Leach suffered a nervous breakdown and was forced to resign from the Museum. The trustees granted him an annuity. He spent time in care and with friends, and in 1824 his older sister Jenny took him to Nice, where they stayed for six months; it seems Leach spent much of his time there out collecting insects. They then spent the next several years travelling in France and Italy, still collecting insects (Leach donated his collection to the British Museum). By early 1836 they were in Genoa, but there was an outbreak of cholera; they moved out of the town in an attempt to avoid it but Elford didn’t manage to escape the disease and died in August of that year, at the age of 45, leaving his sister Jenny to commission a memorial stone for him.

In spite of his short career, Leach is remembered today through the numerous scientific names he created and for quite a number of species which are named after him. But his major contribution to science is that he almost single-handedly modernised British zoology after its stagnation during the long wars with Napoleonic France. It is said that he laid the foundations on which Darwin and Wallace were able to build the theory of evolution by natural selection. One of Darwin’s mentors, John Stevens Henslow, had while a teenager been tutored by Leach in zoology.

And the mystery? Well it concerns Leach’s choice of the genus and species names he created. He sometimes embedded the names of women into these, and in particular he seemed to have a fascination with ‘Caroline’ or the Latinised form ‘Carolina’, of which he used several anagrams: Cirolana, Conilera, Rocinela to name but a few. But there’s no record of who this woman was, or what (if any) was her relationship with Leach, who never married. But whoever she was, she’s achieved immortality by having several crustaceans named after her!

A note on sources

Various short(ish) articles on Elford Leach can be found through a Google search, and the above notes were based on these articles. However, in 2008 a biography was published of Elford and other members of his family, Rifle-Green by Nature, by Keith Harrison and Eric Smith4. The articles I used seem mostly, maybe entirely, based on this book. I had a look around to see whether I could find a second-hand copy, and discovered that Postscript Books are selling new copies (hardback) for £10.99, reduced from £32.50 (here). If you are lucky, as a new (UK) customer you might even get an offer of free postage (unfortunately I had already ordered mine through a different agent when I discovered that!). I’ve had my copy only a couple of days now, so haven’t had a chance to do more than just dip into it yet, but it looks a well-written, thoroughly researched and well-produced book; 500 pages of text and another 100 or so pages of appendices, references and a very detailed index.

That’s it for this week. The next issue is scheduled for Tuesday, 24th March

This newsletter will always remain free. However, if you feel you want to show your appreciation by making a financial contribution you can use the button below to take you to a website where you can do so. I will donate any money I receive through this route to a charity, most likely Butterfly Conservation but other more local wildlife charities might also qualify. Absolutely no obligation, but many thanks if you do.

Make a donation

Report for 16th February to 1st March

I put the trap out on the 19th, first time for seven days, even though the forecast was for quite a chilly night (down to 5 Celsius). But at least there wasn’t much wind - although the forecast for the following few nights was much milder, it was also wetter and windier, so I thought it was worth a try. The result - a single Common Quaker!

Then on the 23rd I decided to have another try; the forecast was quite mild (10 Celsius) but still quite windy. This resulted in three moths, two Common Quakers and one Chestnut.

On the 25th the forecast was for much less wind, and still mild. The first half of the night though, there was a clear sky and a 2/3rds full moon - this doesn’t help as the moon somehow acts as competition for the light trap. However, I decided it was worth a try and was rewarded with 7 moths of 6 species, three of which were new records for the year (Red-green Carpet, Clouded Drab, Hebrew Character)

Then on the 28th I thought I’d try and squeeze in one last trap for February, although the forecast didn’t look promising; 8 Celsius throughout the night, moderate breeze and clear skies with an almost full moon for most of the night. So the result was not overwhelming - just one Common Quaker again.

That brings the totals for February to 22 moths of 10 species, based on 8 night’s trapping, and the species count for the year so far is 12. All these numbers are fairly typical for me for the last few Februaries, well except for last year which was very slow to get going.

Let’s move on to look at some species seen recently.

The Pale Brindled Beauty, Phigalia pilosaria

Year total to date: 3 (31st January and 7th and 12th February)

Here we have yet another moth which flies early in the year and which also has a wingless female. I don’t see large numbers of this moth, but of those I have seen the majority have been in February, with just a couple in December and three in January.

Fresh specimens of this moth give the appearance of greenish-grey colouration; you can perhaps make out a slightly greenish tinge the photo above (or perhaps it’s just my imagination!).

In the edition where I featured the Peppered Moth (here), I went into some detail about industrial melanism, for which that moth is famous. Well, the Pale Brindled Beauty also has a melanic form (form monacharia) that is reported to be commoner in areas affected by pollution. The Waring and Townsend Field Guide to the Moths of Great Britain and Ireland reports that in central London some 60% of the population is of the melanic form. Elsewhere in the country the melanic form is present but at a much lower frequency; Colin Pratt in his A Revised History of the Butterflies and Moths of Sussex reports that although the melanic form can be encountered throughout the county, its frequency is never much above 4% and often rather lower.

I’ve never seen the melanic form myself, but here is a photo from Cambridgeshire, courtesy of Ben Sale, one of our most experienced moth-ers:

One of my subscribers, , who is based in West Suffolk also had a melanic individual earlier this month (this post). At the time of writing it’s labelled as an Oak Beauty but he just got his captions the wrong way round!

As a winter-flying moth, this species has several adaptations for coping with cold weather in common with some other species I have discussed previously (see here). Here’s James Lowen in Much Ado About Mothing:

Its bulbous head swells into a furry thorax-cum-winter-muff, while generously feathered antennae splay perpendicular. In his book Enjoying Moths1, Scottish lepidopterist Roy Leverton recalls discovering a Pale Brindled Beauty encased in ice after landing in a pool that subsequently froze. Leverton chipped out the moth then thawed it. At dusk, the moth flew away, apparently unharmed. The antifreeze done good.

The word ‘brindled’ is used in the common names of several British moths. It’s not a word much used in day to day speech now, so I thought I’d look into it and see what its origin is. Although the word itself has changed a bit over time, the meaning has remained stable - it means ‘having dark streaks or flecks over a grey, brown or tawny background’. In Shakespeare’s time the word was ‘brinded’:

First Witch: Thrice the brinded cat hath mew’d. Macbeth, Act 4 Scene 1.

So probably what we’d call a tabby cat today; one usually thinks of a witch’s familiar as being a black cat, but apparently tabby cats do just as well!

The change to ‘brindled’ came a bit later, possibly influenced by the existence of other adjectives ending in -led, such as grizzled, kindled, speckled etc.

The Middle English form was ‘brended’, which has the same roots as the modern German verb brennen, ‘to burn’. This suggests a meaning along the lines of ‘marked as though by burning or branding’.

In the 16th and 17th centuries the words ‘brinded’ and ‘brindled’ were mainly used of cattle, dogs and (to a lesser extent) horses. In the 18th century phrases such as “a brindled heifer, rising three years old” or “two brindled bullocks, of good size” were frequently encountered in agricultural advertisements.

It was during the 18th century that the word ‘brindled’ started to be used by lepidopterists to describe moths. A similar species to the one discussed here, the Brindled Beauty, is named as such in Moses Harris’s book The Aurelians, first published in 1766. However, that book went through several editions, the last in 1840, and I haven’t managed to work out at which stage this name was introduced (I discussed this book in more detail in the previous edition (here); if you read that discussion you’ll see where the problem lies!).

The other part of the moth’s common name, ‘Beauty’, is also worthy of comment. Just looking at the pictures above, you might be forgiven for wondering how it is justified for this species. English names for moths sometimes have a structure similar to the genus/species system in scientific names. For example, there are quite a few moths where the English name ends with ‘Pug’, all of which are quite closely related. Similarly for ‘Plume’. But the system is not applied as rigidly as it is with the scientific names, and there are exceptions … e.g. ‘Arches’; several moths include this in their name (Black Arches, Buff Arches, Dark Arches etc.) but they belong to different families. ‘Beauty’ falls somewhere in the middle … quite a few of them (about 18 in the UK) are in the Geometridae family and have similar shapes and appearance. Some of them even justify the name! However, there are a few exceptions from other families (Pine Beauty, Tree-lichen Beauty) and even a butterfly (Camberwell Beauty). So it’s never safe to assume that if two moths have the same word in their common name then they’re closely related.

The Common Quaker, Orthosia cerasi

Year total to date: 8 (first 7th February)

The Common Quaker is the commonest of several moths of the genus Orthosia, all of which have their flight seasons in the spring. In fact, this genus usually dominates the spring traps to such an extent that March and April are sometimes referred to by moth-ers as the Orthosia season, rather than as spring! My own records for this species showed average annual catches of around 50 from 2017 to 2023, then in 2024 it went up a bit to 87 and then in 2025 I had a total of 159, pushing this species into 7th place among the most abundant moths for the year.

The photo at the top of this section shows 6 which arrived on the same night, but that’s by no means my record for a single night, which is 27! In his book Much Ado About Mothing, James Lowey describes the Quaker moths as:

— cannon fodder for those who consider moths small, brown and boring.

But although they’re named ‘Quaker’ “in reference to the sombre clothing traditionally worn by members of that dissenting movement”2 , looked at closely they are anything but plain. Here are a couple of individual photos:

The one shown on the left here is fairly typical, while the one on the right has an unusually grey background colour. In addition to some variation in ground colour, sometimes specimens are found in which the stigmata (the two areas on the forewing surrounded by an approximately circular pale line) are touching, or even merged. This is the best example of that variation that I have a photo of:

The first Common Quaker for 2026 arrived on 7th February; this is unusually early and I only have one record of an earlier sighting (1st February in 2022). Although having said that, I do have a couple of records for December 2024. Although it does sometimes happen that a moth turns up completely out of season, having apparently misread the seasonal signs or perhaps pupated in a place which receives warmth from a compost heap or maybe a house or garden office, it is also possible that these December records are reflection of the moth’s flight season moving forwards as a result of climate change. Colin Pratt (in A Revised History of the Butterflies and Moths of Sussex) reports sightings as early as October in 2016 when the autumn was unusually warm.

The genus name Orthosia dates from 1816 and was coined by Ochsenheimer (whom I wrote about here). The link is to the Greek goddess of the hunt Artemis (roughly equivalent to Diana in the Roman pantheon). According to Herodotus, "on the coast of Byzantium there was an altar to Artemis Orthosia”. The word Orthosia comes from ὀρθός (orthos) — “straight,” “upright,” “correct,” “proper.” So “Artemis Orthosia” is not a different goddess, but Artemis in her role as the guarantor of rightness, order, and proper conduct. Moths of the genus Orthosia are famously punctual early spring fliers, so the choice of the name is possibly a metaphor for their seasonal regularity.

The species name cerasi, which means ‘of the cherry’, was allocated to this species in 1775 by Johan Christian Fabricius (1745-1808), possibly in the incorrect belief that the moth’s foodplant was cherry. Fabricius was Danish, the son of a doctor (I wrote a bit about Fabricius in an earlier post about the Wax Moth (here)). Although not wealthy, his father gave Fabricius a very free education, allowing him to follow his inclination for natural history and paying for him to study for two years, 1762-64, with Linnaeus in Uppsala. I wrote a bit about Linnaeus recently (here) and I’d like to quote a passage about this period that I came across in a paper3 by S.L. Tuxen:

His [Fabricius’s] description of the three foreign students (an American botanist, Kuhn and … two Danes) in their garret opposite Linnaeus' house being visited every morning at six by their teacher attired in a small red gown, green fur cap and smoking a long pipe, is most charming. In the summer they lived in a farm house near Hammarby and often gave parties for the family of their teacher who, himself, at the age of 55 … , now and again took part in a "Polsk4" dance "in which he surpassed all of us."

While Linnaeus’s first interest was in botany, Fabricius was primarily interested in insects (which at that time included anything with a hard external skeleton, i.e. spiders, crustaceans, centipedes etc.). Whilst Linnaeus named some 3,000 insect species, Fabricius’s total almost reaches 10,000. And whilst Linnaeus’s system for classifying insects didn’t extend much beyond how many pairs of wings they had, Fabricius based his system on the structure of the mouthparts. He also anticipated the modern approach when he wrote5 in 1803:

If we could depict, e.g., the genitalia in these animals they might be good characters, but they are still smaller than the mouthparts and I would say with Linnaeus: Genitalium disquisitio abominabilis displicet! [Investigation of the genitalia is abominable and displeasing!]"

Linnaeus and Fabricius clearly had high opinions of each other, but Linnaeus did not consider Fabricius as one of his ‘apostles’. This is most likely because Fabricius was not a field biologist; his work was based almost entirely on specimens collected by other naturalists and held in collections throughout Europe. He travelled widely, visiting all the important European national collections and many smaller collections held by individual entomologists, many of which have since disappeared without trace. He spent several summers in London, and also visited Scotland, Holland, France, Italy, Germany, Austria, Russia (St Petersburg), Switzerland, Norway and of course several parts of Denmark.

Fabricius held professorships first in Copenhagen and later in Kiel (which at that time was part of Denmark). In both places his title was ‘Professor in Natural History, Economy and Finance’, and in addition to his several books on insects he also wrote books on economics.

Although Fabricius is now regarded primarily as a systematist, he in fact regarded systematics as a route towards a better understanding of the rules of nature. He wrote: "As we would not call a man learned merely because he can read, so we would not call a man a scientist who knows nothing but the system." He was clearly aware that species evolve, and that this was in some way driven by the environment and through the preference of females to mate with the strongest males. In a book published in 1804 he wrote of “the species of the bigger monkeys from which man seems to have evolved”; clearly a passage that somehow escaped the Bishop of Oxford!

To end this edition, here is another quote from the paper by S.L. Tuxen which I cited earlier:

The life of Fabricius was strikingly different from that of Linnaeus. Linnaeus was very poor as a student and became very rich, esteemed by his king and his country, and many people came to visit the great man. But he lived all his life in Uppsala, became conceited, and was not happy in his life with a dull and difficult wife, as Fabricius tells us. In contrast, Fabricius had a protected youth and a happy marriage with an intelligent and brilliant wife, who was far ahead of her time; their life was notorious for their absent-mindedness, as Henrich Steffens6 tells us. As a professor he lived on a small salary in the outskirts of his country, got no facilities for his studies or help from his country, and was literally forced to travel to improve his studies. His duties as a professor, furthermore, included politics and political economy, etc. In this way, however, he attained a broader horizon than did his beloved teacher; he took part in discussions on nearly everything concerning the politics of his time and he was acquainted with all and sundry within his science.

Fabricius died in Kiel in March 1808, broken (his wife said) by the news of the British bombardment of Copenhagen7 in the autumn of 1807.

That’s it for this week. Now that moth numbers are (hopefully) on the up again, I’m planning to switch back to a weekly newsletter. So the next issue is scheduled for Tuesday, 10th March.

This newsletter will always remain free. However, if you feel you want to show your appreciation by making a financial contribution you can use the button below to take you to a website where you can do so. I will donate any money I receive through this route to a charity, most likely Butterfly Conservation but other more local wildlife charities might also qualify. Absolutely no obligation, but many thanks if you do.

Make a donation

Report for 2nd to 15th February

My first trapping session in this period was on the 3rd; it was a blank!

Then on the 7th the forecast was for a mild night and not too windy, so I put the trap out again … and again, nothing in or around it in the morning! However, on the same night I did have three moths which came to the patio doors (which are not in a direct line of sight with the trap). Whilst it’s not unusual to get moths on the patio doors, it is unusual to get more there than around the trap! Maybe I should think about replacing the bulbs on the trap … my current ones have been going for nearly five years. The moths were all different species, the Pale Brindled Beauty (second of the year), the Common Quaker and a micro, Agonopterix heracliana/ciliella (not uncommon but I didn’t see one last year).

On the 10th the night-time forecast was extremely mild, about 11 Celsius throughout the night, not too much wind but rather wet. The result was just two moths, both Double-striped Pugs (see here); the first time I’ve seen that species this year.

Then on the 12th I had another go; not quite such a mild night but the forecast from the 13th onwards was for a run of colder/windier nights so I thought I’d better try to get another one in before the colder air hit. Turned out to be a good decision because I had 5 moths of 4 species, which included the earliest Angle Shades I’ve ever had, and a micro which I think is Acleris kochiella; only the second time I’ve seen this moth.

Let’s move on to look at some species seen recently.

The Chestnut, Conistra vaccinii

Year total to date: 1 (19th January)

This moth has a similar life cycle to that of the Grey Shoulder-knot, which I described a couple of issues ago (here). That is, the adults emerge in late September but don’t breed until the following spring. Whilst the moths over-winter as adults, they can’t really be described as hibernating because they become active on mild nights, and will feed if they can find anything in flower; one of their favourites is sallow blossom, which appears in early spring.

My records for this species, totalled over the previous nine years, are as follows:

Although these data appear to show a reduction in frequency in the winter months (November to February) compared with October and March, I also run the trap less frequently then so the proportion of nights when I get a Chestnut in the trap doesn’t vary that much throughout its flight season and is actually higher in January and February (at around 10%) than it is in October (about 8%).

The Chestnut is another of those moths which can be quite variable in appearance. The one I’ve shown is quite a light one; they can be much darker and more chestnutty. This German website (here) gives a good indication of the possible range. There is another very similar but less common species, the Dark Chestnut; the key feature to separate the two is the shape of the apex (the corner of the forewing). In the Chestnut it is more rounded. I don’t see the Dark Chestnut every year, but if I get one this year I’ll try to show a comparison photograph.

The genus name, Conistra, comes from the Greek word konistra (κονίστρα), meaning “dust” or “dusty place” - specifically (originally) the dusty floor of a wrestling arena. Many moths can appear dusty because of the scales on their wings. It’s tempting to link the species name, vaccinii, with cows, or at least with cowpox (vaccinia); however this doesn’t appear to be the case, at least not directly. It’s actually a reference to the plant genus Vaccinium, which includes bilberry, blueberry and cranberry. The etymology of that genus name, however, is unclear and there could be a bovine link there somewhere. The species name was coined in 1761 by Linnaeus (about whom I wrote in the previous issue, here), whose description states that the moth is found in connection with Vaccinium vitis-idaea, the lingonberry (which also, interestingly, goes by the name ‘cowberry’!). However, this is not one of the moth’s recorded foodplants, which include, oak, elm, birch, blackthorn, hawthorn and dock.

The Spring Usher, Agriopis leucophaearia

Year total to date: 1 (25th January)

It is reported that this moth can be abundant in oak woodland, but that it is rare in areas where there are few trees. There is a wooded area quite close to me in Eastbourne, but that is mainly sycamore and ash (well, not so much ash these days!) so it is not surprising that I don’t see this moth very often. Indeed, this one from a few weeks ago is the first I’ve seen in Eastbourne, although I did see a few (four to be precise) when I was living near a small area of ancient woodland in Hurstpierpoint. Colin Pratt in his A Revised History of the Butterflies and Moths of Sussex Vol 4 (2020) says ‘Generally confined to our best quality oak woods’. But where it is present, it can turn up at moth traps in large numbers … Colin cites several instances where the hourly count was 100 or so.

Like the Chestnut discussed above, this moth is highly variable in its appearance (sorry !) … check this website (here) to see the variety, which ranges from pale specimens which are almost white with a few grey markings, to others which are almost black all over. Several of the colour forms have been given scientific names, e.g. ab. confusa for the very dark form, but these names are not widely used. However this variability is reflected in the species name, leucophaearia, since it’s a compound derived from two Greek words, leukos (λευκός) — “white, pale” and phaios (φαιός) — “dusky, greyish-brown”. Nonetheless, the moth is quite distinctive due to its shape, where the costa (the leading edge of the forewing) is bent in an unusual direction, which might be described as concave - in most moths the costa is either straight or convex.

All the examples I’ve seen have been in January, but most websites say it is more frequently found during February and March. Regardless, its flight season certainly justifies its somewhat poetic English name … it’s one of those moths whose appearance signals that spring is just around the corner.

Along with some other moths I’ve discussed recently, e.g. the Winter Moth (here) and Mottled Umber (here) (and several other winter flying moths), it is only the male Spring Ushers that have wings … the females have only rudimentary wings and the moth’s life cycle is very similar to that of the Winter Moth previously described. Where it is common the caterpillars of this species also form a substantial part of the diet of great tits and blue tits.

There are several photos of the female moth on this website, and there is also a nice photo on Flickr by the user ‘gillian55’; it’s posted with all rights reserved - I’ve written to her/him for permission to reproduce it here, but so far not heard back. However, you can view the photo on the Flickr site (here).

The Spring Usher was given its scientific species name of leucophaearia by Denis and Schiffermüller (see here for what I’ve written about them previously) in 1775. However, it was known in English as ‘Spring Usher’ well before that date. The following illustration appeared under that name in a book published in stages between 1758 and 1766:

The book in question is by Moses Harris and is entitled The Aurelian: A Natural History of English Moths and Butterflies, Together with the Plants on which they Feed. The book (a facsimile is available here1) is described by Peter Marren in his book on moth and butterfly names (here) as

… by broad consent, the most handsome of all the old butterfly books: the perfect synthesis of art and science.

This view was clearly shared by Norman Riley, Keeper of Entomology at the British Museum (Natural History), who wrote in a short book2 published in 1944:

Classed by some authorities as an amateur, it is nevertheless true that Harris’s work surpasses that of any other British artist and engraver of his class and time, and has an unusual brilliance and artistic merit.

In fact, Riley thought so highly of Harris’s work that he used his drawings3 to illustrate his own book, some 180 years after they were drawn!

Surprisingly little is known about the life of Moses Harris (1730 - c.1788), beyond that he was an illustrator and engraver (he engraved all the plates in The Aurelian himself). He started the book for which he is best known in 1758, funding it by subscription, and it was finally completed in 1766. It contains 41 plates, showing 39 species of butterfly and 93 moths. Many early stages are shown (including two of the caterpillar and one of the pupa of the Spring Usher) and it is clear that Harris must have bred all, or at least most, of the species he included in the book. It seems likely that the name ‘Spring Usher’ was coined by Harris himself; there are books on butterflies and moths with earlier dates than this, but none of them mentions this species. The book contains parallel text in both English and French, and the name in French is given as “L’Huissier du Printems (sic)”, a direct translation of the English name. However, it is unlikely this name was ever used in France, where the common name is the rather unimaginative Hibernie Grisâtre (which roughly translates as ‘Greyish winter-moth’; they missed a trick there!).

I should perhaps mention for those not familiar with the term, what an ‘Aurelian’ is. It’s the name that the early butterfly collectors gave to themselves. In around 1740 a group of men (yes, all men!) with an interest in butterflies and moths and other insects started meeting regularly in London taverns and coffee houses to discuss the latest discoveries and to exchange specimens. The group named themselves The Aurelian Society and they assembled a collection of books and specimens which were kept at the Swan Tavern on Exchange Alley. But at about 1 a.m. one morning in March, 1748 tragedy struck; there was a great fire in the Cornhill district of London, and the Swan Tavern was one of the many buildings destroyed. Indeed, the Aurelians themselves were nearly destroyed too … it seems they had been having a dinner there, were probably a bit inebriated, and ony just managed to get out in time, many of them leaving their ‘hats and canes’ behind. It is recorded that they also lost the Society’s ‘regalia’, whatever that might have been — perhaps they fancied themselves a little like the Freemasons!

After the fire the Aurelian Society ceased to exist for more than a decade, in spite of some attempts to revive it. It wasn’t until the early 1760s that the society reformed, it seems largely due to the efforts of Moses Harris. The new society strongly supported Harris in the production of his book, which was not without its difficulties. Here’s Peter Marren again:

He completed The Aurelian in a mood of some bitterness. Apologising for the ‘tedious length of time’ it had taken, Harris blamed ‘the unsteady and fallacious behaviour of a person too nearly connected in my concerns.’ That person seems to have been a fellow Aurelian, Emanuel Mendez da Costa, the librarian of the Royal Society. The following year da Costa was discovered to be withholding the Society’s subscription fees, was convicted of fraud and served five years in a debtor’s prison. Perhaps he had purloined Moses Harris’s subscriptions too.

The arrest and conviction of da Costa in 1767 had a profound and terminal effect on the revived Aurelian Society. It seems that several members were financially entangled with da Costa, and although some members remained in contact with each other, the society held no further formal meetings and was effectively wound up.

To conclude this edition, here is the frontispiece of Moses Harris’s book:

The well-dressed gentleman in the foreground is most likely a self-portrait. The net on his lap looks extremely cumbersome to use! The quote at the bottom is Psalm 111, v2; ‘The works of the Lord are great, sought out of all them that have pleasure within’ - entirely consistent with 18th century thinking; Darwin’s ‘On the Origin of Species’ was almost 100 years into the future!

That’s it for this week. The next issue is scheduled for Tuesday, 3rd March.

This newsletter will always remain free. However, if you feel you want to show your appreciation by making a financial contribution you can use the button below to take you to a website where you can do so. I will donate any money I receive through this route to a charity, most likely Butterfly Conservation but other more local wildlife charities might also qualify. Absolutely no obligation, but many thanks if you do.

Make a donation

Report for 19th January to 1st February

The forecast for Monday 19th January was relatively mild, still a bit breezy but not actually blowing a gale, so I put the trap out and was rewarded with just one moth, a Chestnut. Normally I see between 2 and 10 of these a year, but I didn’t see any last year so it was good to see it back on the list this year.

Subsequent nights were also quite breezy but on Sunday 25th a quieter night was forecast, but with the temperature down to about 5 degrees C. So I took a chance and again, just one moth … this time a Spring Usher, the first I’ve seen since 2021.

Then the forecast for Saturday (31st) looked promising, mild with not too much wind, and largely overcast. It was nearly a full moon and turned out to be less cloudy than forecast, so there was a bit of lunar competition, but nevertheless I had two moths … a second Winter Moth and a Pale Brindled Beauty. So for January overall, with 5 nights trapping, I had a total of 5 moths of 4 species; fairly typical results for me.

Let’s move on to look at some species seen recently.

The Double-striped Pug, Gymnoscelis rufifasciata

2025 total: 98 (latest, 11th December (3))

Back in August I featured another moth from this group, the Golden-rod Pug (here), but whereas that moth is quite rare in the south of England, the Double-striped Pug is by far the commonest of all the pugs, well, at least in Eastbourne it is - when I was in West Sussex (Hurstpierpoint, 2020-2) it was less common but still among the top few pug species. As far as Eastbourne is concerned, my lowest annual total was 39 (2024) and the highest was 219 (2018).

The historical record shows that this moth has always been widely distributed and at times common throughout Sussex, especially near the coast. Colin Pratt’s1 records from Peacehaven show a marked increase in numbers starting around 1990, with annual totals increasing from around 10 to over 100 by 2010.

The ground colour of this moth and the intensity of the markings are both quite variable; some indication of this is given in the photo collage above. A well-marked specimen (like the one top left in the collage) can be very attractive … Copilot described it as ‘a surprisingly charismatic little pug’!

All moths in the pug family are quite small, with wingspans typically ranging between about 18 and 24 mm. The Double-striped Pug is no exception, with the typical wingspan being 18 or 19 mm. However, this species does seem to be more prone than most moth species to having undersized or dwarf adults markedly smaller than the typical size: I quite often get examples with wingspans at about 12 mm or below. The theory is that this happens when the caterpillar is unable to get enough food, but goes ahead and pupates anyway. The caterpillars feed on the flowers of a wide range of plants, so I guess it’s possible that food sources can sometimes get used up. Back in the summer I found a caterpillar feeding on Hemp Agrimony flowers in my garden:

I think this is definitely a pug moth caterpillar, but whether it is the Double-striped Pug I’m not so sure, since those are usually more strongly patterned than this one, and also Hemp Agrimony is not one of the plants that I’ve seen explicitly listed as a foodplant of this species, although most lists end with something along the lines ‘and other similar species’. Perhaps I should have kept it to see what it turned into!

Several reference books describe this species as having two generations a year, but Colin Pratt in his A Revised History of the Butterflies and Moths of Sussex (Volume 4) describes it as being ‘continuously brooded’. My monthly counts (totalled over the previous nine years) could be used to support either viewpoint:

Although there are two clear peaks (in April and in August/September), adults can be found in any month of year.

The name ‘double-striped’ has always confused me a bit, because these moths have quite a few stripes and I’ve never really been sure which two the name applies to. The consensus of opinion would seem to be that it’s the two brown stripes which I’ve ringed in the picture below - these stripes extend across all four wings and are also present on the moth’s body.

However, the moths also have three pairs of thin pale whitish stripes (and a couple of single ones) and each of these pairs could be described as a double stripe, and I’ve often wondered whether these are the source of the name rather than the two brown stripes.

The genus name, Gymnoscelis, is from the Greek gymnos (‘naked’ or ‘bare’) and skelos (‘leg’) and refers to the relatively smooth, unscaled appearance of the legs in some members of the genus. The species name, rufifasciata, is from the Latin rufi (‘reddish’) and fasciata (‘banded’ or ‘striped’). This species name was assigned to this species by the British entomologist and botanist Adrian Haworth (1767-1833). Haworth was later honoured in the name of another pug moth, Eupithecia haworthiata (Haworth’s Pug). I see low numbers of this moth most years, so hopefully I’ll be able to cover that in more detail in a later Moth Report, and I’ll say more about Haworth himself then. But I know several of my subscribers are partial to the occasional poetic detour, so I’ll end this section on the Double-striped Pug with a poem from the introduction to the book2 in which Haworth names it. It’s anonymous; Haworth introduces it with the words “… thus sweetly sings an unknown bard.” It appeared in print in 1803 but could date back quite a bit further than that. (I should perhaps explain that at one time it was generally believed that the pupation of a caterpillar was a sort of death, with the insect later being born anew as a butterfly or moth).

   The helpless crawling caterpillar trace,
   From the first period of his reptile race.
   Cloth'd in dishonour, on the leafy spray
   Unseen he wears his silent hours away;
   Till satiate grown of all that life supplies.
   Self-taught, the voluntary martyr dies.
   Deep under earth his darkling course he bends
   And to the tomb, a willing guest, descends.
   There, long secluded in his lonely cell,
   Forgets the sun, and bids the world farewell.
   O'er the wide wastes the wint'r tempests reign,
   And driving snows usurp the frozen plain:
   In vain the tempest beats, the whirlwind blows;
   No storms can violate his grave's repose.
   But when revolving months have won their way,
   When smile the woods, and when the zephyrs play,
   When laughs the vivid world in summer's bloom,
   He bursts; and flies triumphant from the tomb;
   And while his new-born beauties he displays,
   With conscious joy his altered form surveys.
   Mark, while he moves amid the sunny beam,
   O'er his soft wings the varying lustres gleam.
   Launch'd into air, on purple plumes he soars,
   Gay nature's face with wanton glance explores;
   Proud of his varying beauties wings his way,
   And spoils the fairest flowers, himself more fair than they.
   And deems weak man the future promise vain,
   When worms can die, and glorious rise again?

The Common Plume, Emmelina monodactyla

2025 total: 20 (latest, 27th December)

I discussed another plume moth recently, the Beautiful Plume (here). The Common Plume, however, is the plume moth I see most frequently; my 2025 total of 20 is about average, and my maximum annual total of 62 was achieved in 2018.

A feature that this moth has in common with the Double-striped Pug discussed above is that although the population has two peaks in the year (in April and August), adults can be found in any month of year. My own records for the past nine years show that I’ve seen it in every month except January. This December record for last year, though, is only the second one I’ve had for that month.

Like other plume moths, the Common Plume has wings which are divided into ‘plumes’; two for the forewings and three for the hindwings. However, when the moth sits at rest it usually shows no sign of the plumes because it keeps its wings tightly rolled up, like an umbrella. This enables it to sit unnoticed in the grass or on flowers, looking more like a bit a dead vegetation rather than a moth, and it also accounts for the species name, monodactyla (‘one finger’), which is how it appears.

Unusually though, the one I had in December didn’t sit like this at all, and it sat with a good portion of its wings visible.

This led me to wonder whether this wasn’t a Common Plume at all, but one of the rarer plume moths. I carefully checked the feature which is usually quoted as being diagnostic for this species. If you look closely at the hind legs in the photo above you will see that at each joint in the leg there is short spur. In fact there are two spurs at each joint, although the second tends to be hidden in this photo. In the Common Plume one of the two spurs at each joint is about twice the length of the other, whereas in other plume moths the two spurs are of roughly equal length. In this specimen the two spurs were definitely of unequal length. Also, no other plume moths are likely to be seen in December, so I concluded this must be a Common Plume. A comparison of the two photos above gives an idea of the range of colours that this moth can have, varying from plain off-white to a speckled grey pattern. Brown individuals also occur, often with a darker brown speckling.

Carl Linnaeus (1707-1778)

The species name monodactyla was given to this moth by Linnaeus in 1758. In some previous Moth Reports I’ve included a paragraph or two about the people who gave moths their scientific names. However, although I’ve included several moths which were named by Linnaeus, I’ve not so far said anything about Linnaeus himself - the man who first developed the binomial naming system for all living things which we still use today, and often described as ‘the father of taxonomy’.

A great deal has been written about Linnaeus — from multiple biographies to an extensive Wikipedia entry (here)— so I won’t attempt to give a full picture his life or to catalogue his major achievements. Instead, I’ve chosen a few salient points and a couple of examples of his work that might not be as well known as his taxonomic legacy.

Carl Linnaeus was born in southern Sweden in 1707. His father was a Lutheran minister and an amateur botanist; he taught his son Latin from an early age and engendered in him an interest in plants.

Linnaeus attended university first in Lund, but after a year he transferred to Uppsala where he could study both botany and medicine, which in those days were closely related subjects because most medical treatments involved the use of plants.

In 1732, at the age of 25, Linnaeus made a 6-month expedition to Lapland, mostly on horseback, looking for plants, mosses, lichens, birds and minerals. He discovered about a hundred previously unidentified plants. He was also interested in the way of life of the Sami people, and one of the things he noticed was that their babies were much healthier than those born to upper class women in southern Sweden, who normally employed wet nurses to feed their babies. This observation led Linnaeus to join a campaign to discourage the use of wet nurses and for mothers to feed their babies themselves.

After two years back in Uppsala, in 1735 Linnaeus went to the University of Harderwijk in The Netherlands in order to continue his medical studies. Within two weeks of arriving in Harderwijk, he had submitted a thesis on malaria which he had written before leaving Sweden, and been awarded a doctorate for it. In his first year in The Netherlands he published the work he is most famous for, Systema Naturae, in which he set out his ideas for an hierarchical classification system to cover the whole of nature’s life forms. It is possible that his choice of the term ‘Mammalia’ for the class of vertebrates, including Homo sapiens, in which mothers feed their young by suckling them might have been influenced by his experiences in the campaign to encourage human mothers to feed their own babies.

During his time in The Netherlands Linnaeus was offered the chance to travel to South Africa and to America, but he turned it down because he didn’t think he would be able to tolerate the heat. However, he did make a trip to England, where he visited botanists in London and in Oxford.

Once back in Sweden, Linnaeus was appointed Professor of Medicine at Uppsala University in 1741. He undertook plant-hunting expeditions to several parts of the country and published many books. One of his fellow professors was the astronomer Anders Celsius, who created his temperature scale in 1742. However, it was the inverse of what we know today, with water boiling at 0 degrees and freezing at 100 degrees. Some sources credit Linnaeus with inverting the scale to the way we use it today, but in fact it seems this was first done by the French physicist Jean-Pierre Christin in 1743. However Linnaeus was a strong proponent of the inverted scale and used it in his own work.

Linnaeus’s status in Sweden continued to rise: he became Rector of Uppsala University in 1750, he was knighted in 1753 and ennobled in 1761. Meanwhile his book Systema Naturae had undergone several revisions and it is the 10th edition, published in two volumes in 1758/9, that is now regarded as the starting point of modern zoological nomenclature. It classifies some 7,700 species of plants and 4,400 of animals, including the Common Plume moth described above. Linnaeus’s description of it is very brief: alis patentibus linearibus indivisis. The translation is something like: alis patentibus (‘wings spread’) linearibus (‘linear’, ‘narrow’, ‘line-like’) indivisis (‘undivided’) which I take to refer to the fact that when at rest the wings are held at right angles to the body, and they appear straight and narrow without any indication of their division into plumes.

After his return from The Netherlands Linnaeus never left Sweden again, but he was a popular teacher and many of his students made overseas expeditions of their own in order to continue his taxonomic work. The best of these he referred to as his apostles. We met one of them in an earlier Moth Report: Peter (or Pehr) Forsskål (1732-1763), in connection with Acleris forsskaleana, a stunning little micro-moth named in his honour, although I didn’t say much about Forsskål himself (see here). As well as being a pupil of Linnaeus, Forsskål studied Oriental languages. In 1760 he joined a six-man Danish expedition to Arabia; they went first to Egypt, where he made a study of Arabic dialects, as well as collecting many plants and animals to send back to Linnaeus. Forsskål gave scientific names to many previously undescribed fish from the Red Sea; the species names he gave them were generally straight transciptions of their Arabic names. The expedition then moved on to what is now Yemen, where three members of the expedition died, including Forsskål himself who died of malaria. The remaining three attempted to flee to India, but one died en route and another on arrival. The sole survivor was the expedition’s cartographer, Carsten Niebuhr, who eventually made it back to Europe. It is thanks to Niebuhr, who completed and published Forsskål’s work, that the achievements of the expedition were not lost forever.

That’s it for this week. The next issue is scheduled for Tuesday, 17th February.

This newsletter will always remain free. However, if you feel you want to show your appreciation by making a financial contribution you can use the button below to take you to a website where you can do so. I will donate any money I receive through this route to a charity, most likely Butterfly Conservation but other more local wildlife charities might also qualify. Absolutely no obligation, but many thanks if you do.

Make a donation

Report for 5th to 18th January

The first trap of the year was 12th January; this relatively mild night was damp but with a bit of a breeze and (apart from 11th January) the first night of the year when the temperature looked mild enough for a few moths to be out and about. However, none visited the trap so the 2026 count is still to get off the ground. There were a few tiny midges around, and one beetle, Oedemera femoralis. This is in the same genus as the more commonly seen Thick-legged Flower Beetle, O. nobilis, but doesn’t have the iridescent green colouring (or quite such thick legs).

Then the night of the 16th was forecast to be quite mild with not too much breeze, so I put the trap out again … not quite a blank this time, just one Winter Moth! However that’s quite appropriate because I’d already selected this to be one of the featured species for this edition.

So, let’s move on to look a couple of moth species seen in December/January.

The Grey Shoulder-knot, Lithophane ornitopus

2025 total: 2 (latest 19th December)

Prior to 2025 I’d seen this moth only twice (once in each of 2022 and 2024), so to see two in one year was rather unexpected. However, this is a moth that overwinters as an adult - they emerge in autumn, hibernate and then reappear in the spring. So it actually makes more sense to count the number seen per generation rather than per year - all three of my previous sightings were in the spring so I’ve in fact never seen more than one per generation and the two seen in 2025 consisted of one of the 2024/5 generation and one of the 2025/6 generation.

There’s a note in the Waring and Townsend Field Guide to the Moths of Great Britain and Ireland that the moth ‘mates in spring’. So it would seem that when the adults emerge in the autumn they abstain from any reproductive activity and concentrate on just feeding and finding somewhere safe to hibernate, and wait until they come out of hibernation in the spring to find a mate and for the females to start egg-laying. It’s unusual among moths to have this long time delay between eclosure (emergence from the pupa) and mating, although there is another species in the same genus (the Pale Pinion, Lithophane hepatica) which has a similar life cycle.

It’s interesting to compare this with another closely related species, Blair’s Shoulder-knot (Lithophane leautieri) which also emerges as an adult in the autumn, but in this case it does not hibernate but mates in the autumn and overwinters in the egg stage. For this species though the foodplant is evergreen, whereas the Grey Shoulder-knot and the Pale Pinion have deciduous foodplants, so there’s no risk of the eggs hatching before there are any leaves for them to eat.

One of the other comments about the Grey Shoulder-knot that crops up in several of the books is that the caterpillars are well known for being cannibalistic! It’s not clear to what extent this happens in the wild, or whether it’s just something that has been observed when the caterpillars are kept in overcrowded conditions in captivity.

The genus name Lithophane comes from the Greek lithos (λίθος) meaning ‘stone’ and phainein (φαίνειν) meaning ‘appearing’, referring to the colour of the forewings. The species name ornitopus is also from the Greek, ornis (ὄρνις) for ‘bird’ and pous (πούς) for ‘foot’. This name was given to the species in 1766 by Hufnagel (whom I wrote about here) and presumably relates to the black anchor-like marking at the base of the forewing; the same marking that gives rise the English common name ‘shoulder-knot’.

In the 1820s the genus name Lithophane was also adopted as an English noun, used to describe a thin plaque of biscuit (unglazed) porcelain carved (or moulded) with varying thicknesses, so when a light was shone through the porcelain sheet the differing thicknesses resulted in differing light intensities, which formed an image. Although there is no direct link to the moth genus, the word is derived from the same Greek roots; the image appeared through what in reflected light looked like just a piece of stone.

Manufacturing lithophanes was a difficult process; most of the attempts warped or cracked during firing because the porcelain was so thin. Although invented in France, the most famous producers were in Germany and the lithophanes were often called ‘Berlin transparencies’ in England. They were popular for use in lamp shades and candle shields, where the image appeared only when the light was on. Another popular use was in the base of drinking vessels, where the image did not appear until the cup was drained and held up to the light. Japanese manufacturers frequently used images of Geishas in this manner, as seen in this sake cup:

Today, lithophane has seen a massive revival thanks to 3D printing, which can easily replicate the varying thicknesses using plastic instead of the original porcelain. If you search for ‘lithophane light box’ on etsy.com or similar you’ll find lots of options where you can submit your own photos to be 3D-printed as a lithophane; I’m rather tempted to order one in which the images are all moths of the genus Lithophane, but I guess the pun would be lost on most people so I probably won’t get around to it. But this is what Gemini thinks it might look like:

(I actually had three goes at getting a more realistic moth picture, and tried Copilot as well, but without any convincing success).

The Winter Moth, Operophtera brumata

2025 total: 1 (12th December)
2026 total to date: 1 (16th January)

Strictly speaking this moth should be described as ‘agg’1, because in fact there are two very similar species which can’t reliably be separated from photos. The other is the Northern Winter Moth, Operophtera fagata. From those specimens where separation has been done, it would seem that the Winter Moth is commoner and more widespread than the Northern Winter Moth, and the Winter Moth is described as being ‘common throughout the UK anywhere near trees and shrubs’. As far as Eastbourne is concerned, though, that’s not been my experience - I’ve never seen more than two in the same year. I did see rather more when I was in Hurstpierpoint in West Sussex - up to eight a year.

This is clearly not everyone’s experience; when I mentioned having seen this one in one of my December Moth Reports (here) I had a comment from a subscriber in East Devon, , saying that on the day before the report was published she had had no fewer than 13 Winter Moths to her lighted windows by early evening! So clearly they can be very common. The Atlas of Britain and Ireland’s Larger Moths, though, reports that ‘the moth’s abundance has decreased substantially since 1970’.

Such a decrease is concerning because eggs laid in December or January hatch into caterpillars at budbreak, and great tits and blue tits time their breeding so that the peak demand for caterpillars to feed their young coincides with the time when Winter Moth caterpillars are active and they are estimated to provide between 40% and 70% of the caterpillar biomass available to the tits. To quote from the Butterfly Conservation website:

Great tits and blue tits feed their young on Winter Moth caterpillars and will time their breeding to coincide with the moth’s lifecycle.

So smaller numbers of Winter Moths means fewer blue tit chicks will survive. And that’s important to other species as well of course … I once heard blue tit chicks and fledglings described as ‘Nature’s little biscuits’! Last year, however, the blue tits that nested in my garden managed to successfully rear their whole brood (although that was not the case the year before).

In a recent post (here) I discussed some of the adaptations that moths have evolved to cope with low temperatures. One of these methods concerns the incorporation of a sort of anti-freeze in their tissues, and I recently found a website which includes a discussion of this in more detail, by April Joy Jovita (here). This is (part of) what it says:

Deep within the cells of cold-weather moths lies one of nature’s most sophisticated survival mechanisms: antifreeze proteins. These remarkable molecules work like microscopic bodyguards, preventing ice crystals from forming in the moth’s body fluids. Unlike the antifreeze in your car, these proteins don’t lower the freezing point dramatically—instead, they bind to tiny ice crystals and stop them from growing larger. The winter moth (Operophtera brumata) produces these proteins in such high concentrations that they can survive temperatures that would instantly kill tropical species. Scientists have discovered that these proteins are so effective, they’re now being studied for potential applications in organ preservation and even ice cream manufacturing.

Like some other winter-flying moths I’ve discussed recently, it’s only the male Winter Moth that flies; the female has only rudimentary wings, as you can see in this photo of a mated pair.

As I mentioned in the post about the Scarce Umber (here), having flightless females makes it difficult for populations to disperse; it all has to be done on foot. Except that for some moths (like the Vapourer, discussed here) the caterpillars have found another way to disperse, which is by ‘ballooning’ - spinning silken threads and letting the wind transport them. Well the Winter Moth is one of those that has learnt to use this trick. The danger, of course, is that the young caterpillars will end up landing on something they can’t eat. In the case of the Winter Moth this danger is to some extent mitigated because its larvae will eat a wide range of different plants - almost any broad-leaved tree or shrub, heathers, and some other species as well. They can sometimes be so numerous as to become a pest, defoliating plantations and orchards.

Once fully fed (late May or June), the Winter Moth caterpillars drop to the ground and bury themselves 1 to 5 cm deep in the soil to pupate. They remain as pupae in the soil until they eclose (emerge from the pupa) in late autumn or early winter. They then claw their way to the surface, and the females find the nearest tree trunk and start climbing and releasing their pheromones to attract males. Once mated, the females continue their climb into the tree and lay their eggs in crevices in the bark, or on twigs, where the eggs overwinter and hatch in spring.

The Winter Moth and its Population Dynamics

It would be remiss of me to leave this account of the Winter Moth without saying something about its role in helping to establish the scientific discipline of population dynamics. To do that, I need to say a bit about an area of woodland called Wytham Great Wood, near Oxford, England (its website is here). The site occupies about 1,000 acres and was donated to the University of Oxford in 1942. Since then, it has been used for numerous scientific studies. As well as the Winter Moth, research has focused on badgers, great tits, tawny owls, and bats - especially on the interactions between different populations - and Wytham Wood is often described as one of the most intensively studied pieces of woodland in the world. I have my own story relating to this wood, but since it’s not germane to the Winter Moth I’ve relegated it to a footnote2.

The research programme on the Winter Moth was led by the Hope Professor of Zoology at the University, George C. Varley (1910-1983). Varley studied entomology at Cambridge, and won the Frank Smart Prize for zoology in 1933. He received a Ph.D. for his studies on “The Natural Control of the Knap-weed Gallfly“ conducted from 1935 to 1938. During World War II, he worked on radar installations on the coast where he was a colleague of the ornithologist David Lack (whom I’ve already mentioned in my footnote relating to Wickham Wood). Indeed, it was as a result of wartime discussions between the two that Lack developed the interest in population ecology which steered much of his future research. In 1945, Varley became a reader in entomology at King’s College, Newcastle upon Tyne and in 1948 he was appointed Hope Professor at Oxford. In 1949, he was best man at David Lack’s wedding.

In his studies of the Winter Moths in Wickham Wood, begun in 1950, Varley’s principal collaborator was another British entomologist, George Gradwell. Some of the methods they used are described by Tim Blackburn in his book The Jewel Box: How Moths Illuminate Nature’s Hidden Rules:

They set traps on the trunks of five oak trees to catch females on their ascent, so that they could calculate the adult population size. They dissected some of their catch to assess their egg loads, and so estimate how many eggs would be laid by the population. They set more traps to catch the caterpillars as they dropped, and dissected them to discover how many had parasitoids. How their estimates of numbers changed across all these life stages allowed them to census3 the Winter Moth population, to identify where death happened, and to infer the major causes. They repeated this painstaking effort for nineteen years. Time-consuming indeed!

Varley and Gradwell’s research enabled them to assess the rates of mortality at different stages in the moth’s life cycle:

• Eggs to early larvae (high but variable mortality);

• Early larvae to late larvae (moderate mortality);

• Late larvae to pupae (low to moderate mortality);

• Pupa survival in soil (high mortality);

• Pupae to adults (moderate mortality);

• Adults to eggs (variable mortality).

By comparing results between years, they showed that mortality was strongly density-dependent during the pupal stage, with higher density being associated with higher mortality. Thus the overall population size was self-regulating, and this was one of the first practical demonstrations of what had previously been primarily theoretical research. This led to the establishment of population dynamics as a scientific discipline, and the pubication of a book Insect Population Ecology: An Analytical Approach by Varley, Gradwell and Hassell (first edition 1974).

More recent work has indicated that population regulation in the Winter Moth operates at several stages of its life cycle, and the process is not dominated by predation during the pupal stage as Varley and Gradwell’s results had indicated.

That’s it for this week. The next issue is scheduled for Tuesday, 3rd February.

This newsletter will always remain free. However, if you feel you want to show your appreciation by making a financial contribution you can use the button below to take you to a website where you can do so. I will donate any money I receive through this route to a charity, most likely Butterfly Conservation but other more local wildlife charities might also qualify. Absolutely no obligation, but many thanks if you do.

Make a donation

For this first Moth Report of 2026, the format and content is different from usual. In place of the discussion of two or three species seen recently, there’s a section giving some summary statistics for 2025, followed by updates on some of the species previously discussed.

Report for 22nd December to 4th January

Most nights during this period have been rather too cold, with forecast minima around 3 degrees Celsius, to make it worth putting the trap out. An exception was 27th December, when the forecast minimum was 7 degrees Celsius, so I took a chance; just one Common Plume was the result.

Since then the nights have again been too cold to make it worth putting the trap out, so no results yet for 2026!

Statistics for 2025

The total number of nights I ran the trap was 90, fairly typical for the last three years (earlier on I was averaging around 110). The total catch was 5779 moths of 408 species. Both these numbers are records; my previous highest numbers were 5326 moths (in 2019) and 398 species (in 2022). This is presumably associated with the warm temperatures and prolonged dry spells experienced during the year.

The 2025 year completes three years in my current Eastbourne garden, and the total number of species for this garden is now 515. If I add in the three years data (2017-2019) from my previous Eastbourne garden the species total is 645. Then if I add in the three years (2020-2022) in Hurstpierpoint the total is 745 species (so still quite a way to go to get to 1000!).

In spite of the record number of species recorded during the year, the number of species new to me was only 28, well down on previous years. Of course, finding new species gets more difficult with each additional year, but hopefully 2026 will produce at least as many.

The most numerous species for 2025 are tabulated below:

It was no surprise that the Large Yellow Underwing and the Heart and Dart retained their places as first and second in the list respectively, in both cases with counts exceeding their 2023 and 2024 totals. Of particular note is the Water Veneer, for which I had only one record in 2023, tying for 234th place with lots of other species that year. This is an aquatic species, and one of the first things I did in the garden on moving to my current house was to instal a wildlife pond. So it’s interesting to speculate whether the increase in frequency for this moth is associated with the new pond!

At the other end of the spectrum, there were 132 species with only a single record during 2025. This is highest it’s been in Eastbourne, although somewhat higher values were observed when I was in Hurstpierpoint. I also made a list of species which hadn’t appeared at all during 2025 but which I’ve seen several times previously in Eastbourne. Among the macros in this list are the Blood-vein (the second year running this has been missing), the Gem, the Burnished Brass (very sorry to have missed this one, it’s one of my favourites), the Marbled Beauty (not seen this since 2020!), the Chestnut and the Satellite (another one missing for the second year running).

My favourite ten species for 2025

I’ve added this section especially for , who recently posted her list (here). I’ve stopped short of ranking them though, I’ve put them in alphabetical order instead! I’ve added a photo (at the end of the list) for those that I’ve not discussed in previous reports, otherwise I’ve added the link back to the relevant report; just click on the moth’s name then scroll through the report to the species in question. I’ve selected three micros and seven macros:

Bisigna procerella

Chocolate-tip

Cream-bordered Green Pea

Cream-spot Tiger

Etainia decentella

Flame Brocade

Gold Spot

Oncocera semirubella

Red-necked Footman

Striped Hawk

Updates for some species discussed in 2025

(Links to the previous reports can be accessed by clicking on the moth’s name in the section title).

Epiphyas postvittana (Light Brown Apple Moth)

When I featured this moth in November one of my subscribers, , left a comment to the effect that I hadn’t mentioned anything about its ‘costal folds’. Well there’s a simple reason for this, I hadn’t been aware of them!

In moths, it’s usually the females that emit pheromones in order to attract potential mates. A female in the process of doing this is said to be ‘calling’, and the pheromones are capable of attracting males from a considerable distance downwind. However, when a male responds to the signal and comes into the vicinity of a calling female, the female then has to decide whether the male is of the correct species, because although female sex pheromones are species-specific, they all use the same limited number of chemicals and it is the ratio in which the different chemicals are present that identifies the species. Thus males will sometimes respond to pheromones from a female of a different species.

So in some species the males produce their own sex pheromones when they approach a female, and several different functions for these have been suggested; it’s possible more than one could be operating at the same time:

• To enable the female to check that the male is the correct species;

• To have an ‘aphrodisiac’ effect, i.e. to help make the female receptive to mating;

• To cause the female to stop calling and thus reduce the potential competition;

• To repel other males, i.e. a sort of chemical mate-guarding.

The costal fold is a small flap in the forewing, lying alongside the leading edge of the forewing (the costa). I had a look through my photos and I found I had one which shows these folds quite clearly:

In this photo the moth has actually tucked its antennae into the folds. I haven’t been able to find any discussion of this behaviour anywhere, maybe this particular specimen is just a bit kinky!

Clive includes a description of the way the male uses its scent in the caption to his Flickr photo:

The male Light Brown Apple Moth directs the costal fold towards the female’s antennae, while rapidly fanning his wings. The pheromones may act to persuade the female not to fly off, or may stimulate female abdominal extension to facilitate mating.

Among those species where the males use pheromones, the mechanics of generation differ quite substantially (whereas in females, the pheromones are almost invariably generated by glands near the tip of the abdomen). In those moths like the Light Brown Apple Moth where a costal fold is used, the scent organ consists of modified scales known as androconia, which are supplied with the pheromone by glands at their base. Other species have patches of androconia on their hindwings, while yet others use bundles of hairs known as hair pencils, which can be located on the legs or on the abdomen. Yet others have inflatable tubes called coremata, hidden when not in use but very obvious when inflated. This photo from Taiwan is a good example:

Udea ferrugalis (Rusty-dot Pearl)

When I featured this moth at the beginning of November, I commented that my count to that point (36) was larger than any previous annual totals I had had. Since then several more have arrived and my total for 2025 is 63, almost double the previous maximum of 32 (in 2023).

This is also the first year in which I’ve seen the moth in December (a total of 5, with the latest on the 21st), and other people who run moth traps in the winter have commented that they are seeing them in December too. This would suggest that the species is having an extended season in France as well (which is where most of those seen here have probably come from); this French moth website (here) gives a histogram by month showing the distribution of all their 5403 records and there are very few in December. If you click the grey icon showing a histogram you should get a more detailed histogram by 10-day periods (well I assume that’s what décade means!).

The Balsam Carpet, Xanthorhoe biriviata

This is one of the first moths I wrote about in these Moth Reports, back in June, and I didn’t say much about it, other than that it was a scarce moth for Sussex and I’d recently seen two, one in my garden trap and the other at a site a few miles from my house, in the grounds at Michelham Priory. This moth is considered to be a resident species which is augmented by migration from the continent, although it’s quite scarce in France and the nearest continental location with substantial number of records is the low-lying area north of Antwerp.

Michelham Priory was founded in 1229, and a moat was dug around it in c. 1390, in response to fears of French raids along the Sussex coast. The moat is now regarded as England’s longest medieval water-filled moat, being almost a mile long, but sadly it is in a very poor state of repair; the sluice gates are broken and much of the moat has silted up and become smothered with invasive plants including Himalayan Balsam and Pennywort.

Another plant which I noticed there a couple of years ago is Orange Balsam; this is an another non-native plant (but from North America1, not from the Himalayas) which has relatively few records from Sussex but is commoner in other parts of the country. It’s also called the Spotted Touch-me-not, because it uses an explosive method of seed dispersal and touching the plant can trigger the ejection of its seeds.

Here’s its distribution map from the NBN Atlas:

This is what the flower looks like:

The relevance of this to the Balsam Carpet moth is that it is one of the caterpillar’s two main foodplants; the other is Small Balsam, which is less common in the UK than Orange Balsam. This is the UK distribution of the moth from the Atlas of Britain and Ireland’s Larger Moths:

Some correspondence can be seen between the moth’s distribution and that of Orange Balsam; the moth’s main population centres in Hampshire, Berkshire and the Norfolk Broads coincide with areas where the plant is found, but the same is not true for the records from East Kent; there are no Orange Balsam records for this area (and none for Small Balsam either) on the NBN Atlas. So these Kent records are a puzzle; it’s possible they are all migrant records, but another possibility is that there is another foodplant yet to be recognised. However, the Kent Moths website (here) shows that most of these records were obtained between 1994 and 2005, with only a handful of records since then and none at all recorded in some years.

But to come back to the Sussex records, following my original report of having seen one Balsam Carpet moth at Michelham Priory, I subsequently saw at least two more. Here’s a photo of one of them:

So whilst the previous sparse Sussex records of this moth are compatible with their being migrants, it does now look as though a resident population has become established at Michelham Priory.

Also, after having my first garden record of this species on 21st June, I was surprised to have a second in the trap on 19th July. Whether this is a migrant, or vagrant from the Michelham (or perhaps some other) new colony is not clear. It will be interesting to see how many (if any) put in an appearance in 2026!

That’s it for now. I’ve decided to switch to a fortnightly schedule during the winter months when there aren’t many moths around, so the next issue is scheduled for Tuesday, 20th January.

This newsletter will always remain free. However, if you feel you want to show your appreciation of it by making a financial contribution you can use the button below to take you to a website where you can do so. I will donate any money I receive through this route to a charity of my choice, most likely Butterfly Conservation but other more local wildlife charities might also qualify. Absolutely no obligation, but many thanks if you do.

Make a donation

Report for w/b 15th December

On the 15th (Monday) there were light winds and it wasn’t too cold. The catch was 5 moths of 3 species, including two Mottled Umbers and two Rusty-dot Pearls.

Then on the 19th (Friday) the forecast was for a relatively still night and mild, although in the event the temperature dropped to about 7 degrees C, rather colder than the forecast. However the trap produced two moths, one December moth and one Grey Shoulder-knot. The latter is a moth I don’t see every year, and this is the first year I’ve had a second (the first was in May).

Now that we’re getting into winter and moths are a bit thin on the ground in the UK, I’m in danger of running out of recently seen species to talk about. So I thought as a change from the usual approach I’d do a sort of Christmas edition this week, and look at some more exotic species that have come to my attention as a result of my starting this Substack newsletter.

Cat’s-paw Emperor, Pseudobunaea tyrrhena

First up, a photo from a fellow Eastbournian who belongs to the same photography group as I do, Jim Sweet. Jim goes to Africa quite often, and on his most recent visit he stayed at Kilifi on the Kenyan coast. One night he was visited by this enormous moth, which (with the help of iNaturalist) he identified as a Cat’s Paw Emperor. It has a wingspan of about 15 cm.

This moth is a member of the family Saturniidae - the same family as the silkworm moth. We have only one member of this family in the UK, known as the Emperor moth, but there are lots of species in the tropics and about 10 species in mainland Europe (mainly southern and eastern). They are typically large moths, and most of them have prominent eye-spots on the hindwings (and some have them on the forewings as well). These are used to frighten off would-be predators. Actually, compared with some other members of the family the Cat’s-paw Emperor’s eye-spots are quite tame. In their book Moths; their Biology, Diversity and Evolution (here) Lees and Zilli say:

… eyespots are particularly common in saturniids, which have developed endless optical tricks to make them appear like wide open startling eyes of owls or other vertebrates. These tricks aim at at circumventing reality, making flat designs appear as convex, tear-lubricated eyes. Just as artists dot a little white patch on eyes to imitate reflected light, saturniids recreate such round pupils and emphasize them using thin white peripheral rings or crescents as if with open eyelids.

Another feature which is commonly found in moths of this family is a small patch of the forewing which has no scales, leaving it translucent; this can be seen in the photo above, particularly on the left forewing. This is known as a hyaline spot or window, but it’s not clear exactly what purpose this serves. Maybe in certain situations it can reflect the sun, or other sources of light, to add to the startle effect that the eye-spots create.

This moth is found in most African countries south of the Sahara, and in the wild has two generations a year, with the adults flying in the wet seasons. The caterpillars feed on quite a few different trees, and apparently this is a quite easy moth to rear in captivity, if you’re that way inclined. Instructions, plus lots of pictures of the caterpillars, are here.

I’ve not been able to find any convincing reason why this moth is named after a cat’s paw. Copilot opines that the adult moth resembles the pads on a cat’s paw, but personally I can’t see it. As for the scientific name, well that’s equally obtuse. The species name, tyrrhena, presumably refers to the Tyrrhenian Sea, or the Tyrrhenian people who lived in western Italy in ancient times, neither of which have anything to do with this moth. The genus name, Pseudobunaea, means ‘like Bunaea’, which is another genus of Saturniid moths (but not sufficiently similar to include it in the same genus!) The roots of Bunaea are not clear; it was possibly chosen just because it sounds good!

Here’s another of Jim’s photos:

As you can see, this photo was taken using flash. The moth had disappeared by the morning so he couldn’t get a photo of it using natural light.

Apona caschmirensis

This next moth is from one of my subscribers who lives in India, . Although she lives in southern India this one was taken on a trip to northern India, Uttarakhand, near the Himalayas. She actually posted a video of the moth, which she rescued from nearly getting trodden on; this picture is a still I extracted from the video.

Although not as large as the Cat’s-paw Emperor discussed above this is still a large moth, with a wingspan of about 10 cm. It belongs in the family Eupterotidae (sometimes called ‘monkey moths’); a family of large, often striking moths known for their robust bodies, broad wings, and fuzzy or spiky caterpillars. They are primarily found in tropical and subtropical regions of the Old World. There are no members of this family in the UK, or indeed Europe.

Little is known about the life history of this moth, which occurs only at high altitudes in places like Kashmir, Sikkim and Nepal. It also appears to be quite scarce, with only 18 sightings recorded on iNaturalist.

For such a scarce moth, I was rather surprised to find that it had been named as early as 1844. It was given the name caschmirensis by Vincenz Kollar (1797-1860), presumably indicating the origin of the specimen(s) he based his description on, Kashmir. Kollar was an Austrian entomologist who specialized in Diptera (flies) and insects of economic importance. The actual specimen(s) on which Kollar based his description was/were most likely collected by this man:

whose full name was Carl Alexander Anselm Baron von Hügel (1795-1870). After studying law Hügel became an officer in the Austrian army and fought against Napoleon’s troops. After Napoleon’s abdication he was stationed with other Austrian troops in southern France and in Italy.

In 1824, Hügel left the army and moved to Vienna, where he set up a botanical garden. Then probably around 1829 or 1830 (but it could have been earlier) he became engaged to a Hungarian Countess, Melanie Zichy-Ferraris. But in 1831, at the age of 25, Melanie broke off the engagement to marry the Austrian chancellor, Klemens Wenzel, Prince von Metternich. It’s possible she just got fed up with waiting for Hügel to marry her, but more likely her head was turned by the much grander social status connected with being the wife of the chancellor (plus acquiring the title ‘Princess’). At 57, Metternich was more than twice her age and had already had two wives, at least one mistress and nine children to his name (one of them with his mistress)!

Deeply affected, Hügel set off on a world tour. From 1831 to 1836 he travelled to the Near East, the Indian subcontinent, the Far East, Australia and Tasmania, before returning to Europe by way of the Cape of Good Hope and Saint Helena. It seems that the most memorable part of this journey (and about which he subsequently published a 4-volume account) was his time in the Kashmir and Punjab regions of northern India. During his travels he collected seeds to send back to his botanical garden in Vienna, and also insects (and possibly other things); it is these that Kollar described in an 1844 publication and where the moth Apona caschmirensis (which this article is nominally about!) was named.

During his time in India Hügel met the daughter of a Scottish military officer, Elizabeth Farquharson (about whom more later). He also spent quite a bit of time with Maharajah Ranjit Singh, the ‘Lion of Punjab’. Singh offered Hügel a lot of money to stay on in India and help train his army, but Hügel declined.

Back in Vienna Hügel concentrated on horticultural matters and on publishing an account of his travels. Also in 1847 he became engaged to Elizabeth, who he had met in India 14 years earlier. But the following year there was turmoil in Vienna, when various sections of the Empire’s subjects revolted and the Austrian chancellor (Prince von Metternich, remember him?) was forced to resign and to flee Vienna with his wife (Melanie, Hügel’s former fiancée) and their children1. And guess who got the job of protecting them during their flight - one Baron von Hügel! That must have led to some interesting conversations. The Metternichs eventually ended up in England for a while, and stayed in Brighton.

Hügel then sold his botanic garden, rejoined the Austrian army and took part in the first Italian war of independence. In 1850 he was appointed Austrian ambassador to the Grand Duchy of Tuscany, in Florence, eventually marrying Elizabeth there in 1851.

Hügel retired from Imperial service in 1867. Given that his wife was Scottish, one might have expected them to retire to either Vienna or Scotland, but in fact they chose to retire to Torquay in Devon!

There’s more about Baron von Hügel on his Wikipedia page (here), and for the really dedicated an account of his travels in India, translated and abridged into a single volume, is available here. And guess what, as a result of a dalliance with a different Hungarian Countess (a married one) it is believed he had an illegitimate son in 1820, who became a Russian general (see here).

Of Hügel’s botanical garden in Vienna, nothing now remains as a public garden; after he sold up it was split into various lots and sold on for development into villas and cottages for Vienna’s upper middle classes. The map below shows a plan of the garden superimposed onto a modern map of the Hietzing area of Vienna; Copilot assures me that the scale and positioning are correct, but I’m not convinced! Actually I can’t even place the street map backing - Google maps denies all knowledge of a Richard Strauss Park in Vienna. There’s a Josef Strauss Park, but he’s a different kettle of fish altogether.

The exotic plants Hügel introduced (especially the orchids and Australian species) were transferred to other collections, notably the Botanical Garden of the University of Vienna. A memorial to Hügel and the gardens, the Hügeldenkmal, was erected near the site of the gardens in 1901. This stands in a small park called the Hügelpark, but it is not part of the original Hügel botanical gardens.

The Sandalwood Defoliator, Amata passalis

This picture of a mating pair was sent to me by (a Substack account which now seems to have been discontinued). It was taken in Sri Lanka, near Kayanwela Lake, Sigiriya. I had a bit of trouble identifying this - Amata passalis is a widespread moth in India and Sri Lanka but most of the photographs of it show the spots on the forewings to be white, rather than yellow. There is a gallery and a geographical distribution map here; the occasional photo in the gallery does show a moth with yellow spots, although if that is just an uncommon variation then it’s very unlikely that both moths in a mated pair would show it! I think most likely it’s either a regional race, or it’s a trick of the light.

There is a closely related species, Amata nigriceps, which does have yellow spots. But that’s an Austalian species, and they have an orange collar and white tips to the antennae, neither of which are apparent in this photo, which apart from the yellow colour of the wing spots shows all the right markings for A. passalis.

The colouration of this species suggests that this is either a warning signal that the moth is toxic and would not make a good meal for a potential predator, and/or that it is mimicking something that is either toxic or has significant weaponry of some kind (eg a sting). Copilot keeps trying to convince me that a likely model is one of the paper wasps of the genus Polistes. Well here’s a photo of one of the Polistes wasps (P. olivaceus) which is common in Sri Lanka (although this photo was taken in Nepal).

Well I’m not convinced (and doubt whether you would be, either!). Of course there are other species, but they all tend to be yellow, or yellow and black, rather than orange and black as the abdomen is in the moth. Also, the sandalwood tree is known to make toxins in its leaves in an attempt to stop them being eaten by caterpillars. But this moth seems to have found a way to process these toxins so that they don’t harm it; whether or not it can also use the ingested toxins to make itself toxic, as many other moths in the same family do, appears not to have been studied. Nonetheless I think that’s a much more likely explanation for the colours of this moth than the mimicry theory.

The common name for this species tells a story in its own right! This moth is a serious pest of the sandalwood industry, especially in India. The Indian Sandalwood tree (Santalum album) is prized for its high oil content and rich fragrance but it is slow growing, taking 15-20 years to reach maturity. Until recently, only the government was allowed to harvest and sell sandalwood, but restrictions have now been relaxed. In Sri Lanka, sandalwood production is more limited and the product is mainly used in temple rituals and for incense. However, the industry is threatened not only by this moth but also by competition from Australia - where the moth does not occur and where they also have access to another sandalwood species, Santalum spicatum, which is faster growing.

That’s it for this week. Wishing you all a Happy Christmas and Merry New Year. I’m planning to take a break for a week, so the next issue is scheduled for Tuesday, 6th January. There are no mild nights in the forecast in the near future, so I’m not sure when I’ll next be running the trap.

Report for w/b 8th December

Although nights have been quite mild recently, mostly they’ve been too windy to be worth putting the moth trap out. But for Thursday night (11th) the forecast wasn’t too bad, so I put the trap out and it produced 18 moths of 7 species. That’s better than for the whole of December for either of the previous two years!

There were no new records for the year, but a couple of species worthy of note were Palpita vitrealis and Udea ferrugalis (Rusty-dot Pearl). These are both autumnal moths which migrate from France, but I’ve never had either of them in December before.

Then on the following night, which was both colder and less windy, I did get a new record for the year when a Winter Moth appeared at the patio doors!

Let’s move on to look at some species seen recently. Again, only two this week owing to the general scarcity of species around at this time of year.

The December Moth, Poecilocampa populi

Year total to date: 5 (latest 11th December (3))

I usually see my first December moth of the year in November, but this year I didn’t see the first one until I had two (a male and a female) on 2nd December. You can see from the photo that the female is larger than the male, and doesn’t have the pale collar that the male has. I haven’t kept records of the sex of the ones I’ve seen, but males are definitely trapped more frequently than females and most of my photos are of males.

In his book Much Ado About Mothing James Lowen describes this moth as

…. hulking, hairy and black. With its buff brow-band, seen front-on, the resemblance to a Musk Ox is uncanny.

See what you think:

Like most other moths in the same family (Lasiocampidae), December Moth adults have only rudimentary mouthparts and do not feed; all the feeding is done by the caterpillars, and the adults survive (but for a few days only) on food reserves built up during that stage. But as a winter-flying moth, feeding at night on nectar-rich flowers would be rather impractical anyway because there aren’t many such flowers in bloom in December! And searching for any which are would use up more energy than it does in spring and summer.

Several other winter-flying moths have flightless females (I already discussed the Scarce Umber (here), and the Mottled Umber is featured below), but the December moth has not evolved down this path. Instead both sexes have a number of adaptations which enable them to survive low temperatures. I once came across a photo of a December moth with several frost crystals on it. I haven’t been able to track down that photo, so you’ll have to make do with one with some raindrops (or maybe dew) on it:

The general hairiness of the December Moth is one of its adaptations against the cold. It’s a strong flier and needs to have warm flight muscles; like many other species the moth can warm up its flight muscles by vibrating them, and the hairiness helps them retain the heat.

Many winter-flying moths have what’s commonly described as ‘antifreeze in their blood’. Their haemolymph (equivalent to our blood) contains glycerol, which reduces the freezing point of their body fluids. Their eyes and antennae also contain specialised proteins that prevent them from freezing so that they are still able to navigate and find mates in very cold weather.

Another technique the December moth is reported to use to tolerate below-zero temperatures is to be able to expel water from its tissues in order to prevent them from being damaged when the water freezes. Having said that, I found this information on only one or two websites about this moth, with no reference to a scientific paper, so I wouldn’t take it as gospel. I did however wonder whether the beads of water in the photo above were the results of such a process, rather than being raindrops or dew. But when I checked my records they confirmed that the photo was taken following a very mild night, so it doesn’t seem likely.

Having said that, the December moth is still a relative amateur at dealing with cold temperatures; Lees and Zilli in their book Moths; Their biology, diversity and evolution report on the High Arctic moth Gynaephora groenlandica which has been recorded as surviving temperatures as low as -70°C. Living in such a cold climate means it can take up to 15 years to complete its life cycle. It has a quite extensive Wikipedia page (here) if you want to read more about it.

The Mottled Umber, Erannis defoliaria

Year total to date: 1 (14th November)

Whilst I see more Mottled Umbers than I do Scarce Umbers (which I wrote about here), I still don’t see large numbers of them. This is another moth that has its adult phase in winter, and where the female is flightless. I’ve seen the males nearly every year, but never more than four in any one year. The caterpillars feed on a wide variety of deciduous trees, including some which I have in my garden, but most likely this moth is most abundant in woodland rather than gardens, and I see only the occasional straggler.

The wing colours in the male are quite variable, and sometimes the pattern is well marked while sometimes the colour is almost completely uniform. Fortunately some moth trappers see larger numbers than I do, which enables them to get pictures like the one below, showing this variety of colours.

As mentioned above, the Mottled Umber is one of those cold-season moths where the female is flightless, like The Scarce Umber I wrote about recently (here). But while the Scarce Umber female does have rudimentary wings, the female Mottled Umber has none at all. And rather than being dark all over, it is off-white with dark spots.

This moth was given its species name, defoliaria, by Carl Clerck in 1759; this is interesting for two reasons. Firstly, the choice of name itself implies that the caterpillars are capable of defoliating their host trees, and at one time this moth was indeed considered an agricultural pest of apple trees and the moth could sometimes be a problem in orchards. But apple is the only foodplant of commercial interest, and for the many other woodland trees available to it any damage just slows the growth of the tree but is unlikely to harm it otherwise. These days it is not considered a major pest of apple production.

The other thing of interest is the date. Carl Alexander Clerck (1709-1765) was Swedish and a contemporary of Linnaeus. He lived in Stockholm and worked in government administration, including in the tax office. He became interested in natural history when he attended a lecture given by Linnaeus in 1739. His main interest was spiders, and in 1757 he published Svenska Spindlar (‘Swedish Spiders’), the first book ever to give binomial scientific names to individual species using the Linnaean system. He actually beat Linnaeus himself to this, since Linnaeus didn’t publish his Systema Naturae until the following year, 1758. Linnaeus’s names for spiders were adopted from those proposed by Clerck, and in the few cases where there are differences Clerck’s name is now accepted as having precedence.

Then in 1759 Clerck published another work, Icones Insectorum Rariorum (in Latin only this time rather than Swedish and Latin as used for the spider book) in which he proposed names for about fifty moth species as well as some butterflies and beetles. It is this book where Clerck proposed the name defoliaria for the Mottled Umber.

Although Clerck did include an illustration in his 1759 book, I’ve opted to show you instead an illustration made by John Curtis (1791-1862), from his book British Entomology (it actually has a much longer title1 ) which he published in 8 volumes between 1823 and 1840. This illustration is from Volume 6 (1834 or 1835), and shows both sexes, the caterpillar and one of its foodplants (it has many), as well as some detailed diagrams of various parts of its anatomy.

I’ll come back to John Curtis again in a future report, but meanwhile here is a part of his text about this moth from the same publication:

Fortunately in this country the larvae are never known to do any mischief, but in France caterpillars of the species figured sometimes do very extensive injury by destroying the leaves, especially of fruit trees; but M. Duponchel mentions an admirable plan for checking their ravages: it is by washing a space round the base with a glutinous matter, so that the females as they pass up the trunk in order to lay their eggs upon the leaves, may be entangled by the gluten and perish, and he adds that by the destruction of one female the birth of 300 caterpillars at least is prevented. Shaking the trees smartly is also effective by causing the larvae to fall, but it is likewise injurious to the fruit.

That’s it for this week. The next issue is scheduled for Tuesday, 23rd December. This will be a special Christmas Edition! Instead of looking at UK moths, I’ve chosen three moths from warmer climes (one from Africa, one from India and one from Sri Lanka) seen by some of my subscribers over the past six months.

I’ve added below (in italics) a brief section describing the background for the report.

Background to the reports

This report is aimed at readers who have a general interest in nature and natural history, but maybe don’t know very much about moths. It’s not really aimed at people who regularly run their own moth traps, but of course they’re welcome to read it (even to criticise it if they wish!).

I run a light trap in my garden in Eastbourne (Sussex, UK) and the main objective of this newsletter is to post photos of some of the moths (and occasionally, other insects) that are attracted to the light, and to say a little about them. On average I run the trap about one night in three, and the plan is to write a post once a week (or less frequently during winter, when there are not so many moths around), featuring two or three of the moths seen in the trap within the previous few weeks.

In the morning I photograph any catches of special interest, then all moths and other insects caught in the trap are released (if they haven’t escaped already!).

2026 will be my tenth year of running a garden moth trap, firstly three years in Eastbourne (2017-2019), then three in Hurstpierpoint (2020-2022), and then back in Eastbourne (2023 onwards). Hopefully, yet more house moves are off the cards for the foreseeable future!

When writing about a specific species, I generally use my own photos for the main illustration, but if there are specific things of interest where I don’t have a photo I will borrow photos from other photographers, or give a link to them if they were posted with ‘full rights reserved’ and I can’t contact the photographer for permission to use them. I don’t follow any rigid plan when talking about an individual species; if I can find something unusual about the species I’ll include that, and sometimes an account will lead me off onto a tangent only loosely related to the moth in question (I think this is called ‘going down a rabbit hole’ in modern parlance!).

Finally a note on paid subscriptions. The Moth Report newsletter will remain free. I might at some stage introduce an option to enrol paid subscribers so that anyone who wishes to contribute can do so, but they won’t get anything extra in return apart from a bit of kudos. This would enable Substack to receive a small fee in return for hosting the newsletter.

INDEX

Macro moths

Apona casschmirensis
August Thorn
Balsam Carpet
Barred Rivulet
Barred Sallow
Blair’s Mocha
Bordered Straw
Brick
Brindled Pug
Brimstone
Buff Arches
Bulrush Wainscot
Cat’s-paw Emperor
Centre-barred Sallow
Chestnut
Chinese Character
Clouded Drab
Common Lutestring
Common Quaker
Common Rustic
Coronet
Cream-bordered Green Pea
Cypress Pug
December Moth
Delicate
Double-striped Pug
Early Grey
Early Thorn
Feathered Ranunculus
Feathered Thorn
Fern
Flame Brocade
Four-spotted Footman
Frosted Orange
Garden Tiger
Gold Spot
Golden-rod Pug
Green Silver-lines
Grey Shoulder-knot
Gypsy
Heart and Dart
Jersey Tiger
Kent Black Arches
Large Yellow Underwing
Light Arches
Lobster Moth
March Moth
Merveille du Jour
Minor Shoulder-knot
Mottled Umber
Mouse Moth
November Moth
Oak Beauty
Oak Hook-tip
Oak Nycteoline
Orange Swift
Pale Brindled Beauty
Pearly Underwing
Peppered
Poplar Kitten
Portland Ribbon Wave
Pretty Chalk Carpet
Privet Hawk
Radford’s Flame Shoulder
Red Sword-grass
Red Underwing
Scarce Umber
Scarlet Tiger
September Thorn
Setaceous Hebrew Character
Small Marbled
Small Mottled Willow
Small Purple-barred
Small Quaker
Small Ranunculus
Small Wainscot
Sandalwood Defoliator
Sprawler
Spring Usher
Spruce Carpet
Striped Hawk
Swallow-tailed Moth
Turnip
Twin-spotted Quaker
Vapourer
Vestal
Waved Umber
Winter Moth
Yellow Belle
Yellow-line Quaker
Yellow-tail

Micro moths

Acentria ephemerella (Water Veneer)
Acleris forsskaleana
Acleris sparsana
Aglossa pingunalis (Large Tabby)
Amblyptilia acanthadactyla (Beautiful Plume)
Apomyelois bistriatella (Phoenix Knothorn)
Argyresthia brockeella
Argyresthia pruniella
Bisigna procerella
Caloptilia hemidactylella agg
Cameraria ohridella (Horse Chestnut Leaf Miner)
Carcina quercana
Cataclysta lemnata (Small China-mark)
Coleophora deauratella
Crocidosema plebejana
Cydalima perspectalis (Box Tree Moth)
Dichrorampha alpinana
Emmelina monodactyla (Common Plume)
Epiphyus postvittana (Light Brown Apple Moth)
Etainia decentella
Eudemis porphyrana
Galleria mellonella (Wax Moth)
Hofmannophila pseudospretella (Brown House Moth)
Hypsopygia glaucinalis
Nomophila noctuella (Rush Veneer)
Oncocera semirubella
Ostrinia nubilalis (European Corn Borer)
Palpita vitrealis
Patania ruralis (Mother of Pearl)
Plutella xylostella (Diamond-back Moth)
Udea ferrugalis (Rusty-dot Pearl)
Yponomeuta sp.
Ypsolopha scabrella

Other insects

Braconid wasp
Celery Fly
Eared Leafhopper
Ferruginous Bee-grabber
Oedemera femoralis
Red-legged Shieldbug
Tawny Cockroach

Entomologists

(Where I’ve discussed an individual entomologist in more than one edition, the link given here is to the latest edition; links to earlier mentions are contained within the later discussion).

Bates, Henry (1825-1892)
Blair, Kenneth (1886-1952)
Bowden, John (1924-2012)
Cavendish-Bentinck, Margaret, Duchess of Portland (1715-1785)
Chambers, Vactor (1830-1883)
Clerck, Carl Alexander (1709-1765)
Esper, Eugenius (1742-1810)
Denis, Michael (1729-1800)
Fabricius, Johan (1745-1808)
Forsskål, Peter (1732-1763)
Harris, Moses (1730 - c.1788)
Haworth, Adrian (1767-1833)
Hoffman, Ernst (1837-1892)
Hübner, Jacob (1761-1826)
Hufnagel, Johann (1724-1795)
von Hügel, Baron Charles (1795-1870)
Kettlewell, Bernard (1907-1979)
Kollar, Vincenz (1797-1860)
Leach, Elford (1791-1836)
Linnaeus, Carl (1707-1778)
Müller, Fritz (1822-1897)
Newman, Edward (1801-1876)
Ochsenheimer, Ferdinand (1767-1822)
Owen, Denis (1931-1996)
Radford, John (1935-2016)
Rebel, Hans (1861-1940)
von Rottemburg, Seigmund (1745-1797)
Schiffermüller, Ignaz (1727-1806)
Scopoli, Giovanni (1723-1788)
Stainton, Henry (1822-1892)
Stephens, James (1792-1852)
Thunberg, Carl (1743-1828)
Treitschke, Georg (1776-1842)
Varley, George (1910-1983)
Walker, Francis (1809-1874)
Wightman, Archibald (1884-1971)
de Worms, Baron Charles (1903-1979)
Zeller, Philipp (1808-1883)

This newsletter will remain free, I’ve no intention of converting it to a paid subscription. It’s aimed at readers who have a general interest in nature and natural history, but maybe don’t know very much about moths. It’s not really aimed at people who regularly run their own moth traps, but of course they’re welcome to read it (even to criticise it if they wish!).

I run a light trap in my garden in Eastbourne (Sussex, UK) and the main objective of this newsletter is to post photos of some of the moths (and occasionally, other insects) that are attracted to the light, and to say a little about them. On average I run the trap about one night in three, and the plan is to write a post once a week featuring two or three of the moths seen in the trap within the previous few weeks.

In the morning I photograph any catches of special interest, then all moths and other insects caught in the trap are released (if they haven’t escaped already!).

This is my ninth year of running a garden moth trap, firstly three years in Eastbourne (2017-2019), then three in Hurstpierpoint (2020-2022), and then back in Eastbourne (2023 onwards). Hopefully, yet more house moves are off the cards for the foreseeable future!

Report for w/b 1st December

I ran two trapping sessions this week; the 2nd (Tuesday) and the 6th (Saturday). Both nights were mild, but rather windier than I would have liked. Nevertheless the first session produced two moths, one male and one female December moth, pretty much right on cue! I’ll discuss this species in next week’s report. But Saturday’s session was blank; I’m hoping a Winter Moth will put in an appearance soon, but they’re not strong fliers and are more likely to appear when there’s less wind.

With this report my newsletter reaches something of a milestone - the first moth described below (The Sprawler) is the 100th species to have been featured in my reports! When I first started writing the newsletter in mid-June I wasn’t sure how well it would work and how long I would be able to keep it going, but complimentary comments and the steadily growing number of subscribers have been very encouraging. Consequently I hope to be able to keep it going for at least the next 100 species.

In recognition of this milestone, and following ’s example in her excellent newsletter Flowerology, I shall shortly be issuing an index which should enable you to go back to the relevant report if you’re interested in a specific moth (or person). I shall attempt to keep the online version of the index updated. I shall also transfer the introductory blurb with which I begin each report into the index, and drop it from ongoing reports, just giving a link to it in each future report. If you get my newsletter by email the index should be in your inbox in a couple of days; it will be additional to the usual weekly report.

Having said the usual report comes out weekly, you will probably be aware that the number of moths that are around falls off quite dramatically during the winter; last winter for example I had only one moth during the whole of January and February (although usually I get a few more than that). So I will need to make some changes for the winter, which will probably include reducing the frequency, perhaps to fortnightly, until the numbers begin to increase again.

Anyway, let’s move on to look at a couple species seen recently; just two this week as there aren’t so many about!

The Sprawler, Asteroscopus sphinx

Year total to date: 1 (23rd November)

In the nine years’ trapping on which these reports are based, this is only the sixth time I’ve seen this moth. All sightings were in November or December, although according to the books the flight season actually begins in October.

The species part of the scientific name is interesting: sphinx. It was bestowed on this species by Johann Hufnagel in 1766. One theory is that this is a nod to the hawk moths, often called sphinx moths in the US, and indeed it’s the genus name of the Privet Hawk moth, Sphinx ligustri. Now Sphinx is the oldest moth genus in existence; it was coined by Linneaus in 1758 … in his publication Systema Naturae he named only three genera for the whole of the Lepidoptera; Papilio for all the butterflies, Sphinx for all the hawk moths and Phalaena for the rest of the moths. So it is perfectly feasible, indeed likely, that Hufnagel knew about the genus Sphinx. But why would he choose it as a species name for this moth we now call the Sprawler - it doesn’t look like a hawk moth at all?

To answer this, I think we should first look at why Linnaeus chose the name for his hawk moth genus. It would appear to be based on the appearance of the caterpillars, which when alarmed adopt a defensive posture in which the front end is raised and then held still, like a statue. Here is a Copilot-generated image which compares the typical hawk moth caterpillar’s defensive pose with the Great Sphinx of Giza:

Well the likeness might not be that great, but we should remember that Linnaeus hadn’t seen the real Sphinx, he would only have seen drawings or paintings of it!

So then we come back to the Sprawler. It turns out that the caterpillar has a similar defensive posture when alarmed; it raises its front section, as seen in this photo:

This I think looks even less like the Sphinx, but I guess it’s probably the similarity in behaviour between this caterpillar and hawk moth caterpillars that suggested the species name sphinx to Hufnagel. Another way of viewing the caterpillar’s pose is that it’s looking upwards, towards the stars. Hence the genus name, Asteroscopus; literally a star-scope.

Apparently this larval behaviour is also what gave rise to the moth’s common name, the Sprawler; so in fact all three components of its name relate to the behaviour of the caterpillar.

While we’ve touched on the defensive poses adopted by some caterpillars, I can’t resist showing you this picture of the caterpillar of a south/central American hawk moth, Hemeroplanes triptolemus. It knocks the Sprawler’s attempt into the proverbial cocked hat!

(If you follow the link in the caption, there are more photos of this astonishing caterpillar on Flickr).

Acleris sparsana

Year total to date: 5 (latest 27th November)

Back in July I wrote a bit about another member of this genus, Acleris forsskaleana (here). In that edition I wrote:

I think it’s a beautifully marked moth; indeed, several of the species in the (rather large) genus Acleris are really quite stunning, abeit on a small scale. None of them is common, but hopefully I’ll be able to show you some more of them in due course.

Although over the years I’ve recorded 11 different species of this genus, this year I’ve seen only these two. That’s doubly disappointing, firstly because in every previous year when I’ve been trapping I’ve always seen at least three of them, sometimes five or even six, and secondly because, having promised you a feast for sore eyes this second species I’ve seen this year, A. sparsana, is probably the least stunning of them all … the species name sparsana rather hits the nail on the head!

The moth’s main flight season is October and November, with intermittent sightings on mild nights at least until January. So it gives the appearance of trying to hibernate, but there’s no spring re-appearance of the moth, and it seems the adults can’t survive until the spring. In Sussex there is a small peak in appearance in July, but the numbers then decrease until the main flight season starts in October.

The name sparsana is attributed to ‘Denis & Schiffermüller, 1775’. Previously in these reports I’ve talked about several species where the same attribution (and date) is given, but without saying anything about these authors. The reason for this is that the story is a bit complicated! However, it’s probably now time to make an attempt at filling the gap.

Denis & Schiffermüller

The best place to start the story is probably in Vienna in 1746 when Empress Maria Theresa sold her summer palace to the Jesuits, in order for them to transform it into an educational institution to train young men for the civil service. The palace was renamed the Theresianum, and the ‘imperial academy’ was instructed to operate to the highest pedagogic and scientific standards.

In 1759 a new teacher of architectural drawing joined the staff of the Theresianum, one Jeremias “Johann” Ignaz Schiffermüller (1727-1806). This new teacher was interested in butterflies and moths, and took part in one of the scientific projects the Theresianum had instigated; a study of the fauna local to Vienna. This project concentrated on butterflies and moths, and at least five of the Jesuit teaching staff of the Theresianum took an active part in the project. Most of the moth species were collected as caterpillars and bred through to adults.

Schiffermüller himself was particularly interested in developing a system to describe the colours of nature (and butterflies in particular) in a standardised way. In 1771/2 he published a book Versuch eines Farbensystems (‘Treatise on a Colour System’), which included this colour wheel:

This was one of the first publications on colour to place complementary colours opposite one another.

But during this time the Catholic monarchies of Europe were becoming increasingly concerned about the influence of the Jesuits, accusing them of political intrigue, possession of too much economic power, and resistance to royal authority. In 1773 Pope Clement XIV yielded to pressure from these monarchs and issued a papal decree formally suppressing the Jesuit order worldwide. The Theresianum staff were disbanded and the college was closed.

It’s not altogether clear what happened to the work done by the project team that had been studying the local Lepidoptera. On the first page of Schiffermüller’s 1771/2 book there is a reference to another work, Ankündung eines systematischen Werkes von den Schmetterlingen der Wienergegend (‘Announcement of a Systematic Work on the Butterflies and Moths of the Viennese Region’) which can be read as indicating that this work was already published, or at least in the final stages of preparation. However, no such work appeared in 1771 or 1772.

There are some clues in contemporary documents that there were plans to add illustrations to the publication; Schiffermüller was a talented artist and this was well within his capabilities. Probably what happened is that the text was completed but the publication was held up waiting for the illustrations to be ready, but was then completely disrupted by the closure of the Theresianum and the dissolution of the Jesuit order. In 1806 an unpublished biography of Schiffermüller, probably written by himself, included the passage:

With regard to copper engravings and illumination, every arrangement had been made — yet once again there came a hostile, all‑destroying fate.

However in 1775 a few copies of the work announced in the Versuch eines Farbensystems did materialise, describing some 1150 species but with minimal illustration, and no author is named. It merely states on the title page ‘Herausgegeben von einigen Lehrern am k. k. Theresianum’ (‘Published by some teachers at the Imperial-Royal Theresianum’). The work is groundbreaking in the way that information about the caterpillars and foodplants is incorporated into the taxonomic organisation of the book.

Over the past 20 years or so several academic papers have been written discussing who the teachers involved in preparing the text were, and what their individual contributions might have been. It seems clear that Schiffermüller was the principal author and the driving force behind the publication, and four other names have been identified as being associated with the work. One of these is Michael Denis (1729–1800), a Jesuit priest, poet and librarian, who was well known in literary circles and who was also interested in natural history. However, there is no evidence that he played a bigger part in the work than any of the other three Jesuits known to be associated with it, other than the observation that Denis was a poet and the text does get quite poetic in places. Quite how the work has come to be described as by ‘Denis & Schiffermüller’ is a bit of a mystery, and it has been proposed that the authorship of the species names introduced in the book should be amended to Schiffermüller only.

In the following year (1776) the work was republished under a different title, in sufficient quantities for Schiffermüller to be able to distribute copies to various naturalists, including Linnaeus. The moth collection on which the book was based was relocated, eventually ending up in the Hofburg Palace, although some of the material was subsequently transferred to the imperial collections and this material now forms part of the Vienna Natural History museum collection. The bulk of the collection though was destroyed in the Hofburg fire of 1848 which occurred during the Vienna uprising.

Schiffermüller had prepared some 400 detailed and accurate illustrations of larvae, pupae and foodplants in readiness for the aborted illustrated edition of the book. These drawings, together with the collection of adults, was made availabe for study by other entomologists including Jacob Hübner whom I mentioned in earlier articles (here). Indeed, Hübner’s illustrations of caterpillars are direct copies of Schiffermüller’s (which are now in the Natural History Museum in London). Direct, that is, apart from a left-to-right inversion; apparently that is quite common when copper engravings are involved. There is a detailed discussion of Denis and Schiffermüller’s work here, including reproductions of some of the caterpillar paintings.

That’s it for this week. The next regular issue is scheduled for Tuesday, 16th December, but there will be another post before then (probably on the 11th) containing the index I wrote about above.

This newsletter will remain free, I’ve no intention of converting it to a paid subscription. It’s aimed at readers who have a general interest in nature and natural history, but maybe don’t know very much about moths. It’s not really aimed at people who regularly run their own moth traps, but of course they’re welcome to read it (even to criticise it if they wish!).

I run a light trap in my garden in Eastbourne (Sussex, UK) and the main objective of this newsletter is to post photos of some of the moths (and occasionally, other insects) that are attracted to the light, and to say a little about them. On average I run the trap about one night in three, and the plan is to write a post once a week, featuring two or three of the moths seen in the trap within the previous couple of weeks.

In the morning I photograph any catches of special interest, then all moths and other insects caught in the trap are released (if they haven’t escaped already!).

This is my ninth year of running a garden moth trap, firstly three years in Eastbourne (2017-2019), then three in Hurstpierpoint (2020-2022), and then back in Eastbourne (2023 onwards). Hopefully, yet more house moves are off the cards for the foreseeable future!

Report for w/b 24th November

Just one outing for the trap this week, on the Thursday (27th). This was the mildest night of the week , with a forecast minimum temperature around 11 degrees Celsius, but it was also wet and, except for the final few hours of darkness, quite windy. So I wasn’t that surprised to find only two moths in the trap on the Friday morning; another Rusty-dot Pearl (about the latest date I’ve ever seen this moth) and an Acleris sparsana. Then on the following night, although I didn’t put the trap out there was one moth that came to the patio door - Palpita vitrealis.

Thanks largely to the astonishing number of moths around on the 13th, the total number of moths seen for November was an all-time record of 134, the highest count prior to this being from 2020 with a count of 72. The total number of species seen during the month was 30, which is actually the same as for November last year!

It’s interesting to note that I’ve not yet seen a December moth this year; the first year this has happened since 2017. On average I see marginally more of them during November than during December.

Let’s move on to this week’s selection of recently seen species.

The Beautiful Plume, Amblyptilia acanthadactyla

Year total to date: 1 (13th November)

I was beginning to think that I wasn’t going to see this moth this year; I’ve never had a year where I’ve missed it completely but I usually see it in either March/April and then again from July onwards. It has two generations a year, the first in July and the second in September; this second generation overwinters as an adult and the March/April sightings are moths which have emerged from hibernation. So I was pleased when this one turned up on an unusually mild night in the middle of November, before it went into its winter sleep.

James Lowen in Much Ado About Mothing has a rather apt descriptive passage about plume moths:

I became bewildered by the utterly unmoth-like appearance of plume moths. With legs held in an ‘X’ and slender bodies from which feathery wings stuck out at right angles, these twiggy creatures fluttered feebly as a gnat.

The Plume moths belong to the family Pterophoridae; the name is derived from the Greek pteron (πτερόν), ‘wing’ and phoros (φόρος), ‘bearer’ or ‘carrier’. So the name just means ‘having wings’, which could apply to (almost) any moth. However, when looked at closely these moths appear to have more than the usual four wings, because each wing is split into lobes (‘plumes’); two for each of the forewings and three for each of the hindwings. These divisions are not so easy to see when the moth sits in its usual T-shaped resting position; the hindwings in particular are crunched up and hidden beneath the forewings, so the moth appears to have a very small wing surface area to fly with.

The lobes are more evident in Jacob Hübner’s 1813 drawing of the moth:

Looking at the drawing, you can see a small tuft of dark scales, pointing downwards, about halfway along the lower edge of the lower lobe of the hindwing. This tuft of scales is usually visible when the moth is at rest, as it protrudes below the forewing. It’s not so evident in the photo above (although it can be seen on the right-hand wing), but is more visible in the photo below, coming about a third of the way along the wing; the other tuft at two-thirds is on the forewing.

These tufts are not present in most moths in this family. Unfortunately though, they are also present in the one which is most likely to be confused with the Beautiful Plume; the Brindled Plume (A. punctidactyla). These two species are so similar that it’s possible that I have seen them both but recorded them all as the Beautiful Plume!

This species has demonstrated long-term trends in abundance that are quite unusual. According to Colin Pratt’s A Revised History of the Butterflies and Moths of Sussex, the species was recorded as ‘common and generally distributed’ by Victorian collectors. However, there are few records from the early part of the 20th century and from about 1930 onwards the species disappeared completely from Sussex records, and did not re-appear until the 1990s. Then by about 2010 the species had become common again in most parts of Sussex. The reason for these fluctuations is not known, because the moth’s foodplants, which include garden geranium, have remained common and widely distributed.

The species name acanthadactyla is based on the Greek words akantha (‘spine’) and dactylos (‘finger’), so it translates as ‘spine-fingered’ and it’s possible the ‘spine’ part relates to the tufts of scales I mentioned earlier. Many of the species names for moths in this family end in ‘-dactyla’, referring to the way the wings are dividided into lobes.

The Setaceous Hebrew Character, Xestia c-nigrum

Year total to date: 127 (latest 13th November)

This is a common moth in most of the UK. In the south it has two generations each year, the first flying in May/June and the second, usually present in much larger numbers, in August/September. This one I had on 13th November is the latest record I have for it; I’ve never had one in November before. This year (as is often the case) I saw hardly any of the first generation, but the count of 108 I recorded for August is the highest total I’ve had for that month.

The ‘Hebrew character’ in the common name refers to the black C-shaped mark alongside the pale triangular mark on the forewing. Whether the early entomologists who coined this name had a particular letter of the Hebrew alphabet in mind is not clear; it’s quite possible that it was just that the mark reminded them of Hebrew script in general. But the character it is most commonly linked with is the 14th character of the Hebrew alphabet ‘nun’, which in some fonts appears as ‘נ‎’. It’s this black mark that also gives rise to the scientific species name, c-nigrum, which is from the Latin and translates as ‘black C’. This name was given to the species by Linnaeus in 1758, so it was among the first group of moths ever to be given a scientific name.

If you’re wondering about the ‘setaceous’ part of the common name, this means ‘bristly’ and is used to separate this species from another common moth, in the same family but not particularly closely related, known simply as the Hebrew Character (Orthosia gothica). This other moth flies in the spring and the flight seasons of the two species do not overlap. I remember reading once that the ‘setaceous’ part of this moth’s name related specifically to bristles (more usually called spurs) on the legs. I haven’t been able to find that reference again, so I checked the legs of both species on the website https://britishlepidoptera.weebly.com - apart from the Setaceous one having slightly longer leg spurs, especially on the hind leg (the longer one), I can’t see much difference!

Fresh specimens of the Setaceous version do show a hairy crest on the thorax, and that could be what this adjective is referring to. It would show up better in a side view, but I don’t seem to have taken any of those. Not that it really matters, because the species are easily separated by their wing patterns and flight seasons.

Another suggestion for the rationale of using the epithet ‘setaceous’ is given by Peter Marren in his book about moth and butterfly names:

‘Setaceous’ means ‘bearing a bristle’, and refers to the white line around the ‘character’ mark.

However I don’t see any sign of such a white line in my photos (although one is clearly present in the Hebrew Character; I guess he must have just got the two species confused). Nonetheless I must thank Peter for pointing me towards another story; that ‘Setaceous Hebrew Character’ was used as a nickname for the 20th century lepidopterist Baron Charles de Worms (1903-1979). He writes:

A well-known Jewish moth collector, the Baron de Worms, whose thinning hair stood up in stiff tufts, was affectionately known by his fellow moth-hunters by that name.

Matthew Oates, in his book In Pursuit of Butterflies: A Fifty-Year Affair also cites this story. He writes that the Baron was accorded this nickname …

…on account of his Austrian-Jewish ancestry and him being distinctly hairy and notably eccentric.

I was a bit puzzled reading these accounts about how one might actually use these three words as a nickname, unless it was as what I think is known as a ‘backstage nickname’, used behind his back. But then I came across an article which I think explains it:

De Worms was a warm-hearted and hospitable man. Entomological friends always looked forward to his Christmas parties, where prizes for games were generally unusual or rare entomological specimens. His friend Russell Bretherton described him as ‘a kindly man, good with cats, dogs and small children. In short, a “character” ’. His friends affectionately referred to him as ‘c-nigrum’, a punning reference to the English name of this moth.

From Michael A. Salmon and others, The Aurelian Legacy: British Butterflies and Their Collectors, University of California Press, 2000, p. 226.

So it looks like it was the Latin rather than the English form of the moth’s name that formed the nickname; this seems much more likely. The photo of him below does not indicate any marked proclivity toward hirsuteness, but that might have worn off by the time this photo was taken!

De Worms also had another nickname, ‘Haemo’. This stems from his professional life working in cancer research, first at the Royal Cancer Hospital and later at Porton Down Experimental Station. I assume from the nickname that his primary interest was cancer of the blood.

One of de Worm’s entomological legacies is the word ‘Charlesing’. To explain it I need to give a bit of background. When moths arrive in the moth trap they sit around on the egg boxes distributed within it, and most of them are just recorded and released without any additional interference, except perhaps for a quick phone photograph to serve as a record. But if the moth-trapper needs to retain the moth for further investigation, or to take a better photograph, it is usually necessary to coax the moth into a ‘pot’. Most people use glass or plastic tubes with stoppers for this purpose, so it’s usually a two-handed operation, one to hold the tube and the other the stopper1. Occasionally (and regrettably) the process goes wrong and the moth gets caught between the two and injured. It is said that as de Worms got older his eyesight started to fail, and the frequency with which this happened to him increased, so much so that injuring a moth in this way became named after him; ‘Charlesing’.

The Baron was a member of the South London Entomological and Natural History Society and regularly attended their meetings for some 50 years. This period covers the (much shorter) period when I was a member myself and attended some of their meetings, so I quite likely met him or at least saw him there. Indeed I remember being told by one of the senior members there that they were engaged in an entomological survey under conditions of great secrecy … but then he couldn’t resist telling me it was a survey of Buckingham Palace Gardens. In an obituary of de Worms’ that is now online it is mentioned that he took part in this survey, so it could have been him. Sadly though, I never got invited to one of his Christmas parties!

If you’re wondering about the ‘Baron’ part of de Worms’ name, it was passed down to him from a great-grandfather who had been made an hereditary baron of the Austrian Empire by Franz Joseph I of Austria in 1871. Permission to use it in Britain was granted in recognition of the family’s service in the development of tea planting in Sri Lanka (Ceylon, as it was then). Charles de Worms never married and the barony became extinct when he died.

In Europe the Setaceous Hebrew Character feeds on a variety of common herbacious plants including nettle, deadnettle, and rosebay willowherb. However in America (where it is sometimes called the Spotted Cutworm) and in Asia it is regarded as an agricultural pest because it also eats alfalfa, clover, corn, sugar beet and lettuce. There have been attempts to monitor population levels in America using pheromone traps. This has led to the interesting discovery that the chemical makeup of the pheromones which best attract the male moths differs from one geographical region to another!

The Spruce Carpet, Thera britannica

Year total to date: 7 (latest 13th November)

Whilst this species was around at the time the common British moths and butterflies were being named (late 18th century), it wasn’t given its britannica name until 1925. The reason for this is that the species was originally assumed to be the same as a wide-spread European species, Thera variata, also (confusingly) called the Spruce Carpet, until it was realised that they are in fact separate species and the British specimens were renamed and given their britannica name. T. britannica is also quite widely spread in continental Europe, where the two species substantially overlap.

To add to the confusion, this species is also very similar to another common UK moth, the Grey Pine Carpet, Thera obeliscata, especially for some of the colour forms of this moth. I don’t claim to be very good at telling the difference between them! Most of the ones I’ve seen I’ve recorded as Spruce Carpets, but it’s really quite likely that some of them (including the one pictured above) are actually Grey Pine Carpets. Both species have two generations a year and fly at much the same times. They do feed on different trees (as their names indicate), so if you see one in a Spruce plantation you could be reasonably confident it’s a Spruce Carpet!

With male moths, there is one difference which can help; that is with the antennae. The male Grey Pine Carpet has ‘threadlike’ antennae, whereas for the male Spruce carpets the antennae are slightly toothed. I don’t see any signs of toothing on the one in the photo above, but of course it might be a female.

I know that a few of my subscribers are experienced moth trappers themselves. If you’re one of these, you’re very welcome to add your opinions in the comments!

That’s it for this week. The next issue is scheduled for Tuesday, 9th December

This newsletter will remain free, I’ve no intention of converting it to a paid subscription. It’s aimed at readers who have a general interest in nature and natural history, but maybe don’t know very much about moths. It’s not really aimed at people who regularly run their own moth traps, but of course they’re welcome to read it (even to criticise it if they wish!).

I run a light trap in my garden in Eastbourne (Sussex, UK) and the main objective of this newsletter is to post photos of some of the moths (and occasionally, other insects) that are attracted to the light, and to say a little about them. On average I run the trap about one night in three, and the plan is to write a post once a week, featuring two or three of the moths seen in the trap within the previous couple of weeks.

In the morning I photograph any catches of special interest, then all moths and other insects caught in the trap are released (if they haven’t escaped already!).

This is my ninth year of running a garden moth trap, firstly three years in Eastbourne (2017-2019), then three in Hurstpierpoint (2020-2022), and then back in Eastbourne (2023 onwards). Hopefully, yet more house moves are off the cards for the foreseeable future!

Report for w/b 17th November

The first part of the week featured some very cold nights, but the Tuesday night (18th) forecast was for a slightly less cold night (minimum 5 degrees Celsius) so I put the trap out on the off chance - but to no avail. Then the end of the week turned milder but with more wind and some rain. I picked the Sunday night (23rd) as having the best chance, and got just two moths - the seventh November moth for the year and a Sprawler, a new record for the year.

Do you get all your deliveries of the Moth Report?

I think most of my subscribers receive my Reports as an email, while a few have switched off this option and view the Reports in Substack. I’ve registered myself as a subscriber so that I can see how the emails look. But a couple of times recently my email has never arrived (and I checked the spam folder!). Also, the list of email addresses that Substack tells me it has sent emails to is only about 70% of the total number it tells me it has sent out. I understand that if emails bounce back Substack will drop the addresses from its list, but I’d be surprised if that accounts for the difference (and I use a dedicated address for mine so I know it was never full).

So if you don’t receive the Report on a Tuesday morning (without having been warned in the previous Report I was taking a week off), please go onto the Substack website to find the missing Report, and leave a comment to the effect that you didn’t get the emailed version. Thanks.

Anyway, let’s move on to look at some species seen recently.

The Feathered Thorn, Colotois pennaria

Year total to date: 3 (13th November (2))

The Feathered Thorn is a distinctively shaped moth with rather variable colouration; these four demonstrate some of this range; see the Sussex Moth Group website for a sightly more extreme range (here).

I mentioned that I had seen my first for this year on 6th November in my report for that week (here), and had a comment from one of my two most supportive subscribers, , that one of her friends plays in a group called ‘The Feathered Thorns’. What a great name for a band! It started me wondering what other moth species might provide a good band name. Obviously a group called ‘The Clouded Drabs’ wouldn’t get many gigs, no matter how good they were. And ‘The Turnips’ or ‘The Cabbages’ would only work for a comedy band. ‘The Flame Brocades’, perhaps? I quite like ‘The Tawny Pinions’ and ‘The Angle Shades’. Suggestions welcome in the comments!

The website for The Feathered Thorns is here. I see they’ve got a track called ‘Moths’, so the name clearly isn’t just an accidental coincidence. I’m not qualified to comment on how good they are, well except in the technical sense (which is fine); my musical tastes don’t extend beyond classical. My son, on the other hand, is a competent heavy-metal guitarist and he writes and records his own stuff. He listened to some of their songs, and agrees with me that they’re technically fine, but (also like me) he claims that they’re not his kind of music so he can’t really judge them from a creative point of view!

The ‘Feathered’ part of the moth’s name is said to be a description of the antennae of the male (see the top left photo), but only the males have this feathering, which they use to pick up the pheromones released by the females. The species part of the scientific name, pennaria, also relates to this feature, it comes from the Latin penna, meaning ‘feather’. The thorax of this moth is also unusually hairy. This probably helps reduce the reflection of a bat’s echo-locating clicks, and so might give the moths a survival advantage. I don’t know whether the band members in The Feathered Thorns grow their hair unusually long; if they do then that could be why they chose this particular moth as the name for their band!

This moth is not known to be migratory, but two specimens were recorded on the Royal Sovereign light vessel moored in the English Channel seven miles off Bexhill, one in 1952 and another in 1956. The first such vessel was stationed on the shoals off Bexhill in 1875. In 1971 it was replaced with a lighthouse built on a concrete platform over the shoals; this lighthouse was manned until it was automated in 1994. Then in 2022 it was decommisioned, and dismantled the following year. Just two moths in around 120 years of having a manned light in the Channel is not strong evidence for regular migration, although collecting wildlife data (birds and insects) was not one of the official duties of the keepers and it would depend on the interests of the individuals concerned whether they did this or not. I lived in Bexhill for about 25 years (left there in 2016), and can remember seeing the Royal Sovereign light from the promenade; if it’s visible from seven miles away it would have been a very powerful moth attractant! I missed the news about it being decomissioned.

I don’t usually include photographs of the caterpillars of the moths I feature, for the simple reason that I don’t actually have many of my own. But for this moth I do have one, so here it is:

This moth (along with several others I’ve featured) is a member of the family Geometridae, which translates as ‘earth measurer’. The reason for this name is that the caterpillars have legs only at the back (two pairs) and front (three pairs) ends, whilst most other families have extra pairs of legs along the length of the body. The manner of locomotion of the Geometrid caterpillars is to pull the hind legs right up to the front legs, and then move the front legs forward as far as they can reach, and draw the hid legs up again, etc. This causes the body to alternate between stretched straight and bent into a loop, and gives the appearance that the caterpillar is measuring the ground as it moves forwards. It also gives rise to an alternative name for the family, the ‘loopers’. The German common name for this species is ‘Federfühler-Herbstspanner’ … the ‘spanner’ at the end of the name translates as ‘looper’ or ‘measurer’, and Herbst is autumn, so the second half of the moth’s name means ‘autumn looper’. The first part translates as ‘feather-feeler’, where the ‘feeler’ part refers to the antennae. When I was young I remember people using the word ‘feelers’ as a child-friendly version of ‘antennae’.

The November Moth (agg), Epirrita sp.

Year total to date: 7 (latest: 23rd November)

Well here am I thinking of including an entry on the November moth in the next but one Moth Report, while reading the Saturday edition of The Times, and what should I see in the paper but a picture of a November moth! It’s in Nature Notebook:

All Epirrita dance an etherial jig in the headlights and hover ghostly outside the sitting-room window at night.
John Lewis-Stemple, The Times, Saturday 15th November.

There are four UK moths in the genus Epirrita; they are all variable and the markings on the different species overlap substantially, so it is never safe to try to identify them to species level just from the appearance of the wings. One of them, E. filigrammaria, the Small Autumnal Moth, has an earlier flight season than the others, so if seen before late September then it can be confidently identified as such. But (a) I’ve never recorded one as early as September, and (b) neither has anyone else in Sussex (according to the Sussex Moth Group website), so that one can definitely be ruled out!

It’s supposed to be possible to separate the males of the other three species by looking at their genitalia with a hand lens or low-powered microscope without harming the moths (well apart from injuring their dignity). Here’s what they’re supposed to look like:

And here’s a photo I took of the relevant area:

Well, you tell me! But the commonest species is the November Moth, Epirrita dilutata, so it’s quite likely that’s what this one is.

The females have a slightly different wing shape (being a bit broader at the base), and also the hindwings tend to protrude further beyond the forewings when the moth is at rest, so the picture at the bottom left is possibly a female, with the others more likely to be males. The females of the three species can’t be separated even by dissection, so if you really want to know which species a female is the only way is to let the female lay some eggs (which they do readily), breed the caterpillars through and wait for them to emerge the following November. If you’re lucky some of them will be males and then they can be identified to species.

I’ve seen this moth every year since I started trapping, but never more than eight in a single year. And before now, never more than three on the same night, so the five I had on 13th November is a record.

The species name dilutata was assigned to this moth in 1775. It’s from the Latin dilutatus, ‘washed away’ or ‘diluted’, and reflects the fact that the patterning on the wings can appear very faded, even in a fresh specimen.

The Scarce Umber, Agriopis aurantiaria

Year total to date: 1 (13th November)

Although it has ‘Scarce’ in its common name, this species is described as ‘common’ in most reference books. However, this is only the second time I’ve seen this moth (first time was in 2017) so in my book its name is fully justified.

The flight season is November and early December, and like some other moths with flight seasons late in the year it is only the males which are winged; the females have rudimentary wings and remain on the foodplant, for which several deciduous trees including Silver Birch are used. The females climb up the trunks at night to lay their eggs in niches in the bark, or on twigs, and the eggs don’t hatch until new leaves emerge in the spring. This is what the female looks like:

Only a few moth species have evolved to have a winter flight season … whilst this has some advantages, for example the skies are less crowded and the bats are all hibernating, there are disadvantages too. It takes more energy to fly in the cold, nights are often wet and windy and the foodplants will have lost their leaves. This might be why a bigger proportion of these species have flightless females than is the case for species which fly at other times of year.

Having a flightless female involves other trade-offs too. In a previous edition (here) I wrote about the Vapourer moth, whose females are also flightless but where the caterpillars can travel by ‘ballooning’; by spinning silken threads and letting the wind take them, like spiderlings do. But Scarce Umber caterpillars haven’t learnt this trick, and so the only means of dispersal the species has is by the females (and/or the caterpillars) crawling from one tree to the next. This obviously limits the species’ ability to spread and colonise new habitats. Nonetheless, it has still achieved quite a widespread distribution in Britain and Ireland, although according to the Atlas of Britain and Ireland’s Larger Moths it’s abundance at monitored sites has undergone a major decline. This book also comments that the moth’s flight season is now about three weeks later than it was back in the 1970s; this is possibly a response to the warming climate.

The species name aurantiaria was given to this moth by Jacob Hübner in 1799, it’s from the Latin aurantium which was used for both the colour orange and the fruit; it’s the same root as for aranciata, Italian for orange squash. This is a scan of Hübner’s drawing of the moth (link here):

That’s it for this week. The next issue is scheduled for Tuesday, 2nd December.

This newsletter will remain free, I’ve no intention of converting it to a paid subscription. It’s aimed at readers who have a general interest in nature and natural history, but maybe don’t know very much about moths. It’s not really aimed at people who regularly run their own moth traps, but of course they’re welcome to read it (even to criticise it if they wish!).

I run a light trap in my garden in Eastbourne (Sussex, UK) and the main objective of this newsletter is to post photos of some of the moths (and occasionally, other insects) that are attracted to the light, and to say a little about them. On average I run the trap about one night in three, and the plan is to write a post once a week, featuring two or three of the moths seen in the trap within the previous couple of weeks.

In the morning I photograph any catches of special interest, then all moths and other insects caught in the trap are released (if they haven’t escaped already!).

This is my ninth year of running a garden moth trap, firstly three years in Eastbourne (2017-2019), then three in Hurstpierpoint (2020-2022), and then back in Eastbourne (2023 onwards). Hopefully, yet more house moves are off the cards for the foreseeable future!

Report for w/b 10th November

Two trapping sessions this week, the 10th (Monday) and the 13th (Thursday). Both nights were mild, but on Monday there was quite a stiff breeze; Thursday was much less windy (and even a bit milder). There was a marked difference in the catches; just 5 moths of 5 species on the Monday but Thursday produced an astonishing 94 moths of 22 species, smashing my previous November records convincingly. Previously, the maximum number of moths I’ve recorded for the whole of November was 72!

Two of the species from Thursday were new records for the year, one of which (Scarce Umber) I’ve seen only once before. There were also large numbers of several migratory species which I’ve written about before, including 18 Rusty-dot Pearls and 23 Palpita vitrealis (exceeding my previous maximum whole year total, 20).

Then on the Friday night, although I didn’t run the trap another first for the year, the Mottled Umber, turned up on the patio doors.

Let’s move on to look at some species seen recently.

The Turnip Moth, Agrotis segetum

Year total to date: 87 (latest: 13th November (5))

This is another of those moths whose caterpillars are sometimes described as ‘cutworms’, because they live under the soil surface and when they emerge to feed at night have a tendency to eat through the base of their foodplants, thus killing them completely. I’ve featured a couple of other moths with this distinction in previous reports, the Pearly Underwing and the Large Yellow Underwing.

As you’ve probably realised, this moth is an agricultural pest of turnips. It also eats lots of other plants; the most susceptible crops are lettuce, leeks and beetroot, with turnip listed as among the least susceptible (here). In the south of England the moth has two generations a year, the first flying in May-June and the second in August-September; it is the caterpillars that follow the first generation that cause the agricultural damage; those following the second generation are not so much of a problem. The caterpillars from the second generation overwinter as larvae and pupate in the spring. Research has shown that milder and drier winters lead to increased survival rates among overwintering larvae. As an agricultural pest this moth is most evident in Europe and in Africa; it seems not to have become established in the United States.

Actually it is only the older caterpillars that exhibit the ‘cutworm’ lifestyle; for the first two instars1 the caterpillars stay on the foodplant all the time, and it is at this stage that they are most vulnerable to pesticides and also to wet weather. In 1983 a paper was published which used historical weather data combined with catch records for the turnip moth to construct a model which can be used to predict the severity of the turnip cutworm investation in the coming season. This model has been programmed into the forecasting tool sponsored by the Agriculture and Horticulture Development Board (see here). The principal author of this paper was John Bowden (1924-2012), an entomologist working at Rothamsted Research Station, and the work was done in conjunction with what was then the National Vegetable Research Station (NVRS), now part of Warwick University. I visited both the NVRS and Rothamsted regularly in the 1970s during my first job as a statistician, which was at a sister research facility, the Glasshouse Crops Research Institute, Littlehampton (now, sadly, a housing estate!).

It seems to be a feature of the Turnip moth that it has occasional years when it is very abundant; in the 1983 paper mentioned above it is reported that 1949 and 1976 were such years, when quite severe damage was done to crops. My records since 2017 reflect this, since until this year the largest number I saw in a single year was 19, and most years the count didn’t get into double figures. This current year though is different; I had 57 in June alone and the current running total is 82. Most likely this is a reflection of the fact that the period when the first and second instar first generation larvae were feeding (late spring) was very dry and so their survival rate was high.

I probably shouldn’t leave this discussion without commenting on the fact that, as you can see from the pictures, the moth is quite variable in its appearance. It’s also quite similar to several other species, so identification can get a bit tricky at times! One thing that helps is hindwing colour, which is almost pure white in the males with a few thin black lines. In the females it is pearly grey. For anyone with a moth trap who wants more help in identifying the Turnip moth, NatureSpot (based in Leicestershire) has produced a video which describes the main features (here). It rather concentrates on the males though, if your specimen is female it won’t match all of the features mentioned in the video.

Epiphyas postvittana (aka the Light Brown Apple Moth)

Year total to date: 35 (latest 13th November (4))

This is another moth with a very variable appearance, but in other respects it’s quite unlike the Turnip moth discussed above. Firstly, it’s an adventive; that is, it is not a native of the UK, but was introduced accidentally (the first UK record was from Cornwall in 1936) and has since become well established across Wales, Ireland and southern and central England. So well established in fact that it’s often referred to by the initials of its common name, the LBAM, rather than by its scientific name or its full English name.

In spite of its common name, its caterpillars feed on many more plants than just apple; it’s been recorded on more than 500 different plant species, including several of commercial importance such as citrus and grape varieties, so it can justly be described as polyphagous (=eats lots of different things).

It’s native territory is Australia, where it’s a major agricultural pest, especially in the fruit- and wine-growing areas of Victoria, New South Wales, South Australia, and Tasmania. It’s also a serious pest in New Zealand, where it was first recorded in 1891. However, although it is common and widely distributed in southern parts of the UK it is not yet regarded as a major pest species here, although this could change as viticulture expands. In his book ‘Much Ado About Mothing’ (has to take the prize as the best title for a moth book!), James Lowen comments that in the UK

it is largely an urban and suburban species, less readily found in the wider countryside.

As an urban species it is more likely to feed on ornamental plants typically found in parks and gardens than on vines. It seems likely that the reason this moth has not become a pest here, compared with the antipodes, is that there are genetic differences between the populations which give them different preferences regarding their food plants. Maybe the UK population is not so oenophilic as the native population in Australia. Such a difference could easily have arisen through genetic drift, or through the founder principle; if the first specimens to arrive here were brought in on ornamental plants they are likely to be ones that preferred this type of food plant.

The worldwide distribution of this moth (here) is quite interesting. It’s missing from large parts of the world, including most of Europe, but is found in the Azores and Madeira (but not the Canaries) and also in Hawaii and California. The first record from California was in 2007, where it was regarded as a potentially invasive species and massive efforts were made to prevent its spread. Over 50,000 pheromone traps were deployed, together with aerial spraying campaigns, but after four years or so these attempts were abandoned. Subsequently it has not turned out to be a major pest of vineyards, and behaves more like the UK population, but (as here) it is closely monitored in case it shows signs of reverting to its more destructive tastes.

More about variation, etc.

The four colour forms shown above are not the complete repertoir that this moth displays (on the link about about the worldwide distribution you can click on ‘gallery’ to see more examples). To complicate matters further there is another moth, also quite common in the UK (Clepsis consimilana) which can easily be mistaken for some of the colour forms of the LBAM. Fortunately there’s an easy way to tell the difference (most of the time); the palps. I wrote a bit about palps in an earlier report (here); these are sensory organs attached to the head. In the LBAM they are much longer than in Clepsis consimilana, and stick out horizontally in front of the head. They can be seen in the photos above (except for the one bottom left, in which they are completely missing).

One of the unusual features of this moth is that the adults can be found in any month of the year. I see it most often in August, but I have several records of it from January and February. So it seems that the moth is continuously brooded in the UK, with multiple overlapping generations. Larval development slows in the winter; the caterpillars live in loosely spun leaves of the host plants, feeding intermittently when temperatures allow.

The species name postvittana is taken from the Latin post- (‘after’ or ‘behind’) and vitta (‘band’, ‘stripe’ or ‘ribbon’) and presumaby relates to the banded brown colouration of the wing extremities which can be seen in some of the colour forms. The name was given to this moth in 1863 by Francis Walker (1809-1874). He was a British entomologist who was contracted by the British Museum to catalogue their collection of insects (excluding the beetles).

Walker was born into a wealthy Quaker family and spent part of his childhood in Switzerland, where (together with an older brother) he was collecting butterflies at the age of nine. During this time the family was visited by, among others, Lord Byron. He became one of the most prolific entomologists of the 19th century, describing tens of thousands of species and playing a central role in organizing the museum’s insect collection. Many of these insects came from collections made in the British colonies, including material from Australia (which included the LBAM specimen he named). Some of the insects he described had been collected during the voyage of the Beagle.

Walker later attracted a fair amount of criticism for being a somewhat careless taxonomist, naming species twice, giving names to species which others had already described, and giving insufficient diagnostic detail. One of the most scathing obituaries I’ve ever read was written about him in The Entomologist’s Monthly Magazine in 1874 (available online here). Unsurprisingly, it’s unsigned.

However, most taxonomists of the time made similar mistakes, and it is due to the enormous volume of Walker’s output that he appears to have made more mistakes than most. Another obituary (available here), this time signed, was much more detailed and complimentary. Today he is regarded as having made an enormous and positive contribution to insect taxonomy.

The Yellow-line Quaker, Agrochola macilenta

Year total to date: 1 (4th November)

There are several moths with ‘Quaker’ in their name, some of which are spring moths and others are autumn moths. This one, of course, is one of the latter. The yellow line is the diagonal line near the end of the wing, which runs right alongside (and below, in this orientation) a darker line which is grey-brown in this example, but is often red and sometimes much more prominent than the yellow line. And that can be confusing because there’s also a moth called the Red-line Quaker! But that’s usually a much darker moth, and it doesn’t have the black dots at the base of the wing (the top, in this orientation).

Neither of these moths has been a freqent visitor to my trap; I’ve never had more than seven of either in a single year, more usually it’s between 0 and 2. In my previous Eastbourne garden, the Yellow-line was commoner than the Red-line; indeed I saw only one Red-line in the three years I was there. But in Hurstpierpoint, and back in Eastbourne again the Red-line has been commoner than the Yellow-line; indeed this is the first Yellow-line I’ve seen since 2021. It’s hard to say whether that indicates a real change in the species’ abundances, or whether it’s just due to the different gardens involved.

This moth is in the same genus (Agrochola) as the Brick, which I covered last week (here), but I didn’t discuss its meaning. It has Greek roots, agros (ἀγρός) ‘field’ or ‘rural land’, and chole (χολή), ‘bile’ or ‘gall’. So, a moth of the fields which is the colour of bile; not the kindest of names to lumber a moth with! The ‘chole’ bit is the same root as in ‘cholera’, for example. The species name, macilenta, means ‘lean’ or ‘thin’. The moth is perhaps marginally sleeker than the Brick, but also it could just mean these moths are a bit thin on markings. The name Quaker itself is said to relate to the relatively plain appearance of these moths. The species name was assigned by Jacob Hübner, whom I wrote about earlier (here and here), in 1809. He is also responsible for the (bilious) genus name.

That’s it for this week. The next issue is scheduled for Tuesday, 25th November.

This newsletter will remain free, I’ve no intention of converting it to a paid subscription. It’s aimed at readers who have a general interest in nature and natural history, but maybe don’t know very much about moths. It’s not really aimed at people who regularly run their own moth traps, but of course they’re welcome to read it (even to criticise it if they wish!).

I run a light trap in my garden in Eastbourne (Sussex, UK) and the main objective of this newsletter is to post photos of some of the moths (and occasionally, other insects) that are attracted to the light, and to say a little about them. On average I run the trap about one night in three, and the plan is to write a post once a week, featuring two or three of the moths seen in the trap within the previous couple of weeks.

In the morning I photograph any catches of special interest, then all moths and other insects caught in the trap are released (if they haven’t escaped already!).

This is my ninth year of running a garden moth trap, firstly three years in Eastbourne (2017-2019), then three in Hurstpierpoint (2020-2022), and then back in Eastbourne (2023 onwards). Hopefully, yet more house moves are off the cards for the foreseeable future!

Report for w/b 3rd November

Two trapping sessions this week, on the 4th (Tuesday) and the 6th (Thursday). Although mostly mild, nights have been quite breezy for several days on end - so I had a few nights off! The Tuesday night was still quite breezy, but by the Thursday night the wind had dropped and it was relatively still. Although the moon was near full, both nights were overcast and so there wasn’t much competition from the moon.

Numbers from the two nights were quite similar - 12 moths of 9 species on the Tuesday and 17 moths of 9 species on the Thursday. However, the make up of the catches was rather different, with only four species common to the two nights. On the Tuesday, most of the species were larger moths, including three Large Yellow Underwings (probably the last ones I’ll see this year), whereas with one exception all the moths from the Thursday were small ones, including one each of Udea ferrugalis (Rusty-dot Pearl), Nomophila noctuella (Rush Veneer), my latest ever Cydalima perspectalis (Box Tree Moth) and Palpita vitrealis.

Both nights produced one species which was new for the year; a Yellow-line Quaker on the Tuesday and a Feathered Thorn (the exception mentioned above) on the Thursday, one of which might make it into next week’s report.

In passing, I’d just like to mention that by subscriber total nudged past 300 during the weekend, and currently stands at 349. Many thanks to all of you (and my followers), it will keep me inspired to keep writing during the winter months when there are not so many moths about!

Anyway, let’s move on to look at some species seen recently.

The Gold Spot, Plusia festucae

Year total to date: 1 (21st October)

Although described in the books as ‘common’, I usually see only one or two of these a year. The one I had last year was the first I’d seen since 2020. Probably the reason for this discrepancy is that it prefers damp habitats like fens and riverbanks, so perhaps if I ran my trap near a river or marsh I’d see them more frequently.

The genus name, Plusia, comes from the Greek plousios (πλούσιος) meaning ‘rich’ or ‘ornate’, and several of the moths in this genus have gold or silver spots on them. This is the first moth from this genus that I’ve covered in the Moth Report, and hopefully I’ll get round to some of the others in due course. But J.W. Tutt, in his 1902 book British Moths, says:

In my opinion the palm for beauty must be given to this species with its golden-brown ground colour, its metallic blotches of silver near the base and apex…

Whilst the silver spots on the moth’s forewings are its most distinctive feature, the moth also has a marked thoracic tuft, or crest, rising from the thorax. This shows particularly well in a side shot; in the more conventional views from straight above it is usually not so evident. It’s not entirely clear what purpose this tuft serves (several other moths in the genus also have one). It doesn’t seem likely that it has a role in flying. Maybe it just helps to disguise the moth’s outine, to make it look less like something edible. The silver spots are also believed to have this effect.

The caterpillars’ foodplants include various sedges, Yellow Iris, Great Bur-reed and some wetland grasses; the species name festucae relates to one of these, fescue grass. When the caterpillars pupate they spin semi-transparent cocoons which can be quite difficult to spot (even though it’s quite obvious in this photo!):

Caloptilia hemidactylella/honoratella

Year total to date: 1 (28th October)

This is a tiny little moth with a wing length of about 7mm (making it quite difficult to photograph!). Caloptilia is a large genus of leaf-mining moths which all stand in this characteristic pose, with their heads raised. Some of them are fairly common, but others, like this one, are rare in the UK. There are actually two possibilities for this moth, Caloptilia hemidactylella and C. honoratella. Both species have very similar life histories and the adults cannot be reliably told apart just from a photo - the only way of being certain which species it is is to kill the moth and look at its genitalia under a microscope. However I’m not keen on the idea of doing this and prefer to release the moth alive, and just record it as a member of the aggregation of the two species. Whichever species it is, it’s a good record; the County Moth Recorder tells me that for both species there are fewer than half a dozen Sussex records in the past 150 years.

Both species have two generations a year, with the second generation overwintering as an adult and re-emerging in the spring, so this is a second generation adult and will be looking for somewhere safe to hibernate. In their early stages the caterpillars are leaf miners in sycamore or field maple, but after their second or third moult they come out of their mines and fold a corner of the leaf over to make a shelter in which they can live.

The genus name Caloptilia has Greek origins, from kalos (καλός), meaning ‘beautiful’ or ‘graceful’, and ptilon (πτίλον), meaning ‘wing’. The species name hemidactylella was assigned in 1775, and the first part hemidactyl is also from Greek and means ‘half-fingered’; the -ella suffix is Latin and is just a diminutive. It’s not clear why the moth merits the ‘half-fingered’ description, especially as there is another group of moths whose forewings are split into two (the Plume moths), many of which have species names built around ‘dactyl’ (‘finger’).

The other species, honoratella, was not named until 1914, by Hans Rebel (1861-1940). It is not clear whether this name was intended as a tribute to someone named ‘Honorat’, or is based on the Latin honora (‘honour’). However it might be worth saying something about Rebel himself, who was honoured with a mention by Vladimir Nabokov in his 1930 short story ‘The Aurelian’ (which can be read here):

(The genus Agrotis is genuine, while the species name is made up, to honour the protagonist of the story, Paul Pilgram).

Born near Vienna, Rebel first studied law and gained a doctorate in jurisprudence from the University of Vienna in 1886. His interest in butterflies and moths led to him abandoning the law as a profession (can’t say I blame him!) and in 1893 he joined the Naturhistorisches Museum in Vienna as a scientific assistant. He gradually rose through the ranks, becoming curator of the Lepidoptera collection in 1897 and eventually Director General of the museum in 1925. Rebel transformed the museum’s Lepidoptera holdings into one of the largest and most significant in Europe, a position which it retains to this day (containing around 10,000 drawers of butterflies and moths).

The Brick, Agrochola circellaris

Year total to date: 1 (21st October)

Another moth with a strange name! The name relates to the brick-like colouration, although the colour does vary a bit from moth to moth (but then, so do bricks!). Some idea of the range of variation can be seen in its gallery on the Sussex Moth Group’s website (here).

The Brick is another autumnal moth, flying from mid-September and sometimes still on the wing in early December. However, in spite of it being described as frequenting woodlands, parks and gardens, I don’t see it very often. This is only the sixth one I’ve seen, and the first since 2022. It’s favourite foodplants are the Wych-elm and the Ash, and the young larvae feed on the flowers and unripe seeds. As the caterpillars develop, they switch to feeding on the leaves. Other deciduous trees such as Poplar, Aspen and Sallow are also used.

The species name circellaris is based on circellus, a diminutive of the Latin circulus and which means ‘small circle’; this relates to the circular mark visible on the forewings. This name was given to the moth in 1766 by Johann Hufnagel (1724-1795), who I mentioned briefly in an earlier report (here) in connection with another moth, the Buff Arches, and who I described as ‘a theologian and entomologist’. I’ve since been reading more about Hufnagel, whose legacy includes 87 species names still accepted in modern taxonomy. Until the late 20th century we knew little about J.S. Hufnagel - even his forenames were unknown. His papers in the Berlinisches Magazin, in which he described many moth species, were all that entomologists knew about him. The story of how we now know more about him and his life is rather intriguing.

It starts with the work of one Adolf Otto Fischer (1869-1946), a protestant pastor with an interest in genealogy. In 1941 (after dropping the ‘Adolf’ part of his name!) he published a work called Evangelisches Pfarrerbuch für die Mark Brandenburg seit der Reformation (‘Protestant Clergy Directory for the March of Brandenburg since the Reformation’).

In 1987 two entomologists, M. Gerstberger and L. Stiesy, published the results of their investigations using Fischer’s work, in which they identified Hufnagel as one of the protestant clergymen whose careers (as clergy) were summarized in Fischer’s publication.

Hence we now know that Hufnagel’s father and grandfather were both protestant clergymen, and that his placements were in Petersberg and Langenfeld (now Jemiołów and Długoszyn, both in Poland).

The names Hufnagel gave to the moths in his collection also had a rather serendipitous path to being recognized today. His descriptions of the moths were very brief, and also somewhat ambiguous because he didn’t have a standard terminology for the different areas of the moths’ wings. There were no drawings, so “the only way to be sure which moth was being described was through the specimens in his collection. Hufnagel passed his collection on to another German entomologist, Siegmund A. von Rottemburg (1745-1797) who used the material to publish more detailed descriptions of many of the species. It’s largely thanks to von Rottemburg that we can be sure about which of Hufnagel’s names apply to which moths (although there are still some gaps). After von Rottemburg’s death the collection vanished, so we have no type specimens to refer to today.

In 1844 Hufnagel’s legacy received a further boost when Philipp Zeller (whom I wrote about in a recent newsletter, here) undertook a further review of his work, giving further publicity to Hufnagel’s names. There is more information about Hufnagel on his Wikipedia page (here).

That’s it for this week. The next issue is scheduled for Tuesday, 18th November

This newsletter will remain free, I’ve no intention of converting it to a paid subscription. It’s aimed at readers who have a general interest in nature and natural history, but maybe don’t know very much about moths. It’s not really aimed at people who regularly run their own moth traps, but of course they’re welcome to read it (even to criticise it if they wish!).

I run a light trap in my garden in Eastbourne (Sussex, UK) and the main objective of this newsletter is to post photos of some of the moths (and occasionally, other insects) that are attracted to the light, and to say a little about them. On average I run the trap about one night in three, and the plan is to write a post once a week, featuring two or three of the moths seen in the trap within the previous couple of weeks.

In the morning I photograph any catches of special interest, then all moths and other insects caught in the trap are released (if they haven’t escaped already!).

This is my ninth year of running a garden moth trap, firstly three years in Eastbourne (2017-2019), then three in Hurstpierpoint (2020-2022), and then back in Eastbourne (2023 onwards). Hopefully, yet more house moves are off the cards for the foreseeable future!

Report for w/b 27th October

The final trap for October was on the Tuesday, 28th. Although the temperatures were mild, it was quite breezy (and the forecast stays that way for several nights). The total numbers were disappointing (14 moths of 8 species), but one moth in particular made up for it. The only problem is, it’s very small and it’s a tricky one to identify! It’s either Caloptilia hemidactylella or it’s C. honoratella. It’s what you might call an ‘in-betweener’. Both these moths are very rare for Sussex, and I’ve not seen either of them before. I’ll probably just record it as an ‘agg’ (or aggregate).

Also, this moth has the distinction of being my 400th species for the year, which is my highest ever annual total, and hopefully will go up by another half dozen or so species by the end of the year. It also brings the species count for October to 64, another record, my highest previous count being 59. I said at the beginning of the month (here) that maybe the good weather this summer had just moved everything forward a bit, in which case this would be reflected in a dearth of species at the end of the year. This does not seem to have happened, suggesting that this has been a good year for moth diversity all round.

Anyway, let’s move on to look at some species seen recently.

Udea ferrugalis (aka the Rusty-dot Pearl)

Year total to date: 36 (latest 28th October (5))

The species name for this moth, ferrugalis, is from the Latin ferrugo, ‘rust’. It’s one of the micro-moths that has a well-established English common name, the Rusty-dot Pearl, also based on the same idea; it’s easy to see how the name originated from the rust-coloured marking on the wings. Actually, although I described the English name as well-established, one of the older books (published 1952) I have on this family of moths actually calls it just the ‘Rusty Dot’; the ‘Pearl’ bit was added later and was applied to several closely-related species. The whitish legs are are a feature of several of this same group of species.

This moth is most usually seen in this country as a migrant from the continent, and although it can breed here during the summer it is not believed to be able to survive our winters (yet!). As a migrant it displays two of the classical signs; firstly it is most commonly seen near the coast (although it has been found throughout the British Isles (although not so frequently in northern Scotland), and secondly it is much more abundant in some years than others.

My own records demonstrate this latter feature; since I started trapping in 2017 the lowest annual count was just two in 2018, but in 2023 I had 32 and so far this year, 36. But seems I just missed out on one of the bonanza years, which was 2016; at a light trap in Peacehaven (also on the south coast, about 14 miles west of Eastbourne) a total of 792 were recorded in that year. As well as varying between years, numbers can vary wildly within years as the migrant moths arrive in waves when the wind is in a favourable direction. Of the 32 moths I saw in 2023, 16 arrived on the same October night.

The name ferrugalis was given to this moth in 1796 by the German entomologist Jacob Hübner (1761-1826), whom I mentioned briefly in an earlier post (here). Hübner trained as a designer and engraver, and for three years from 1786 he worked in this capacity in a cotton factory in Ukraine. While there, his fascination with butterflies and moths increased, eventually becoming his dominant interest. He named hundreds of species and many genera, and many of these names are still in use today. His meticulous illustrations and species descriptions formed a cornerstone of entomological literature. This is his illustration of the Rusty-dot Pearl, taken from his book Sammlung europäischer Schmetterlinge (‘Collection of European Butterflies’), published in parts between 1796 and 1805:

(Link to the scan from which this picture is taken here).

The diversion which follows is somewhat longer than my usual diversions, so I’ve given it its own section.

Moth illustrations in books

I’ve mentioned in a couple of previous Moth Reports how the style in which illustrations of moths in text books has changed over time, but my previous comments might have been a bit misleading in some respects. Let’s look at a modern field guide then work backwards.

This is a plate from Field Guide to the Moths of Great Britain and Ireland (Third edition) by Waring and Townsend, published in 2017. The illustrations are by the talented artist Richard Lewington. The typical illustration shows the moth in its normnal resting position, either from above or from the side. Individual wings are shown extended (i.e. in the ‘set’ position) only if they show features which are critical for identification.

Some books dispense with hand-drawn illustration altogether, for example British Moths: A Photographic Guide to the Moths of Britain and Ireland by Chris Manley uses only photographs of live moths. The second edition is dated 2015. I don’t actually possess a printed copy of this book, but I have an electronic version which I find very useful. Most species show several photos; here is an example from my iPad:

The plate shown below is from Moths of the British Isles by Richard South. The edition I have was published in 1961, but the first edition dates from 1907. The illustrations all show the moths in their ‘set’ position, and all aligned with their heads pointing to the top of the page. According to Copilot, illustrations for the first edition were based on photographs of museum or collectors’ specimens, reproduced using chromolithography. However the 1961 revised edition used colour photography for printing the plates.

I don’t have any of the earlier editions of South’s book. I suspect that the change from chromolithography to colour photography was made on the basis of cost. However, I do have an original copy of an earlier book, J.W. Tutt’s British Moths, published in 1902. This book has only twelve colour plates, but they were printed by chromolithography. Here is Plate 11:

The quality of these plates actually looks better to me than the plates in the 1961 edition of South. Also, although some of the moths in the plate are shown with their heads pointing directly north, others are shown at an angle, perhaps to make a more pleasing visual layout.

Going back to the early days of moth/butterfly books, we find none of the moths are shown with their heads pointing straight up; they are all positioned at an angle and some are even shown in a position we would today consider to be almost upside-down:

This is a plate from Beiträge zur Geschichte der Schmetterlinge by Hübner, published in parts between 1786 and 1790. These books were published with ‘hand-coloured’ illustrations; the printed books would contain just faint outline drawings, and each individual copy of the book was completed by a skilled colourist (they often worked in teams) using watercolour or gouache to complete each plate. This book contains 48 plates, so that’s quite a lot of work, just for one copy of the book!

Before leaving the topic of preparing plates for books, perhaps I can throw in a story of my own. In 1970 I was staying with my friend and colleague Denis Owen (Wikipedia entry here) at his campus bungalow in Fourah Bay College (now the University of Sierra Leone), Freetown. Denis was in the process of writing a book, Tropical Butterflies (here), in which he wanted to include a colour plate illustrating one of the mimetic complexes he had discovered in the nearby forest. The task of taking the necessary photograph was delegated to his wife, Susan (as were most tasks of a technical nature!). This was something Susan had never done before, and there was quite a bit of discussion about how to achieve it. The main problem was how to light the butterflies in such a way that they didn’t leave shadows.

Susan’s research suggested that the way to do this was to arrange the butterflies on a ground glass plate, with blobs of plasticine to hold the pins firm, and shine additional lights onto a white surface a few inches below the plate in order to eliminate the shadows. This is a photo I took using the setup she assembled:

As you can see it’s not 100% successful, but actually not far off. In the published book, the printers have managed to remove what’s left of the shadows. The butterflies also all have full pairs of antennae (I think those missing in my photo above got lost in the process of scanning the photo from a 35mm colour slide, the software probably thought they were noise!).

For anyone interested in what the butterflies in this plate are, those in the left column are all different species of Bematistes, distasteful species in the family Acraeidae (the models in the mimetic assemblage). The mimics in the right column are all colour forms of the same species, Pseudacraea eurytus, a palatable butterfly in the Nymphalidae family. So this is an example of Batesian mimicry. I won’t go into any more detail here, since it’s not the main subject of this post, but I wrote a bit about mimicry (and Henry Bates) in an earlier edition of this newsletter (here).

The Small Marbled, Eublemma parva

Year total to date: 1 (21st October)

The scientific species name for this moth, parva, means ‘the little one’, and is very apt for this species which has a wing length of just 8mm. Nonetheless it is actually a macro-moth, belonging to the same family, the Erebidae, as some much larger species. These include a couple of species I have written about in earlier editions of this newsletter; the Garden Tiger (here) and the Red Underwing (here).

In contrast, the moth with which I began this edition, the Rusty-dot Pearl, is a micro-moth, but it has a wing length of 10mm so it is actually larger than the Small Marbled. I managed to get a photo of them together (well more or less!):

Both these moths are migrants, but while the Rusty-dot Pearl is common in the UK, the Small Marbled is considered a scarce migrant - this is the first one I’ve ever seen. Most sightings are recorded as June or July, although there have been some October records. The Small Marbled is primarily a moth of southern Europe and northern Africa, but UK records have become more common in recent years. By 2019 the total number of UK records was around 600, mainly from the south coast of England (with a bias towards south-western areas), but there are records throughout most of England and few from Scotland.

Like the Rusty-dot Pearl, this moth was also given its species name, parva, by Jacob Hübner. This is his illustration of it:

One of the foodplants of the Small Marbled is Fleabane, although caterpillars are rarely found in the UK. But when I was living in Hurstpierpoint there was a meadow nearby (Hurst Meadow) in which there was quite a lot of Fleabane, and over the three years I did spot a couple of insects which are not particularly common which have associations with that plant. One was a fly, the Fleabane Gall Fly, Myopites apicatum:

The other was a day-flying moth, Tebenna micalis:

That’s it for this week. The next issue is scheduled for Tuesday, 11th November.